cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/post/6888554
Inspired by: “UK and France abandon plans to recognise Palestinian state at conference”
cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/post/6888554
Inspired by: “UK and France abandon plans to recognise Palestinian state at conference”
I am, in fact, biased against things that destroy the environment.
not to reply to two of your comments, just hanging around town rn ig lmao.
but:
better stop browsing the internet period, then. the last time you watched youtube or streamed anything it consumed far more system resources and it produced far more pollution than the vast majority of machine learning is even remotely capable of. why pick on the data centers used for AI when they’re handily outnumbered by infrastructure for other equally, if not more vain corpo products?
i genuinely mean this question in good faith, but, are you and others who harp on the environment in this discourse just ignorant of how the entire modern technology sector is actually built and runs? if your answer is anything but yes, then, why is your position objectively inconsistent and arbitrary? are you just too in the shit to realize you actually hate corporations and companies, not artificial intelligence technologies?
I’d like to see a source on that, first of all. Second, “banning video content” isn’t really a viable or realistic option, and would also put a lot of people out of work, and the existence of video content provides value in education, artistic expression, and entertainment. AI slop does not, it’s wholly unnecessary, ugly, limits expression, puts artists out of work, etc.
Well, first, Deloitte says data centers as a whole only account for 2% of global energy use.
This means that while yes, artificial intelligence is hogging an increasing portion of system resources and compute globally: it is still only a very, very small fraction of the energy usage of humanity as a whole or even the tech industry alone.
According to your own source’s numbers, AI’s share of data-center electricity usage is roughly 82 terawatt (also your Wired article’s author misspells terawatt as terrawatt the entire time, maybe it is a spelling I’ve just never seen?) hours, roughly similar to the annual electricity consumption of Switzerland. Sounds bad, right?
Well, yes, but actually, no.
Global energy consumption this year is around 34,000 TWh. That means that if data centers represented 2% of global energy use, data centers this year used around ~500-700 TWh total. (34,000 * 0.02 == 680)
That means that, again, using Wired’s own value of 82 TWh, AI alone represents only around 12% of global data center energy usage. Keep in mind that is not 12% of global energy usage, it is 12% of the global 2% energy usage data centers are collectively responsible for, meaning AI is responsible for a fucking staggering ~0.24% of global energy use.
What is the other 88%, of data center energy usage, you might ask? A bunch of corpo bullshit, including, namely; infrastructure for social media, streaming, and all this other shitass tech everyone readily accepted with no qualms until the spooky “AI” boogeyman made people wake up about the wider environmental impacts of big tech.
Except, not really though. Because as we see, most people are like you, and have a weird laser-focused obsession with the energy usage of AI in particular. You are doing a disservice to environmentalism by being intentionally ignorant of the wider implications of these statistics and their context. Don’t believe every sensationalized fucking Wired article you find after doing a Google search, friend.
Sorry to cut in, but I have to hard disagree here.
The post in question has given someone the possibility of creating an image on par quality of any other *ball meme and saved about 20-30 minutes of work. It is an artistic expression, isn’t more or less ugly than other *ball memes of similar type, enhanced the expression of OP (who would had worse results for more work), and no artist can subsist on the creation of memes.
Also, it is very possible to create stuff like this on consumer grade hardware, taking not much more power than running a video game.
I agree that AI CAN be used to create piss-poor excuses for art or to push artists out of their work, but it’s the corpo’s doing that, not the technology. I also groan everytime AI gets shoehorned into another thing where it simply does not offer anything useful, but it surely makes a difference if a corp uses AI as cost-cutting measure, or a private person uses it to enrich their life, which - we shouldn’t forget that - the technology should be there for.
This is the one thing the Anti-AI trolls can’t wrap their heads around or if they can they refuse to and instead try to strawman their previous point, because without that part their argument is purely copyright apologia.