LemonDrop 
C++ Crazed
@Background Pony #9196
I did not bring it up no, someone else did, and they did in the context of how much money it would cost business wise, which I correctly pointed out is not a problem because people are willing to pay to do this. Nowhere in there is there an environmental argument, as I said the environmental argument is totally nonsensical. Also your “official data” is wrong, deal with it.
I did not bring it up no, someone else did, and they did in the context of how much money it would cost business wise, which I correctly pointed out is not a problem because people are willing to pay to do this. Nowhere in there is there an environmental argument, as I said the environmental argument is totally nonsensical. Also your “official data” is wrong, deal with it.
Also interesting that that you ignored the last part of what I said, you are fine with banning video games right? I mean you seem to think any sort of recreation that uses more energy than you deem satisfactory is unacceptable and video games objectively use just as much energy due to needing to render things constantly while playing them.
Also I’m sorry that you think you can just back peddle on your claims. First oh no generating an image is as expensive as a car driving 4 miles we’re doomed. Now it’s well ok everyone is doing it and they are doing it all day sooo now it’s as bad as driving a car 4 miles. The comparison was wrong in the first place which is all I pointed out, and even if it was correct, like I said before it does not matter. People are willing to pay for it, just like people are able to drive their car 1000 miles for something they want to do and pay for that.
You do not dictate who gets to use energy if they pay fairly for it. Read that again and burn it into your head because you’re just not getting it and I am tired of having to explain it to you. This argument is nonsense because of this fact alone, stop trying to have it by bringing back irrelevant stuff that doesn’t attack this point specifically, you will never win by doing that (though something tells me you’re just trying to deflect anyways).
You are bitching about AI and using it as your scapegoat thinking getting rid of it will solve the environmental problems in the world. It won’t, you know this, I know this, so stop pretending it will and stop with the dumb energy use argument. If you truly cared about such things you should be complaining about things like legislation around energy generation, e.g. making carbon-intensive generation methods more expensive, which would deter the usage of such energy sources and make it more costly to exploit them if companies chose to. That and you would probably be a vegan too, but something tells me you aren’t and just like to complain online rather than change your lifestyle while probably eating more cheeseburgers worth of CO2 emissions than any AI damage the average person does yearly lmao.
Also if you’re curious in the numbers, 1 burger is something like 2-3 kg of CO2e. In the US electricity is around 0.4 kg of CO2e per kWh, so eating a single burger is equal to generating AI images on a consumer GPU for something like 16 hours straight. Also note of course this is just in the US, as things transition to renewables the damage of the burger remains fairly constant and the number of AI generation hours to match it skyrockets, in Iceland for instance 1 kWh of electrical energy generates only 0.01 kg of CO2e which would mean running a consumer GPU and generating AI images for something like nearly a thousand hours. Better ban burgers too while you’re at it (unironically something I think needs to be done for the sake of the environment at some point once other sources of emissions are dealt with, that or more realistically just tax it into infinity with how many emissions it generates and let the market deal with the consequences as I suggested with anything electrical-based too).
Finally because I thought this would be fitting for this discussion and I guess I’ll just add it on to this already too-long of a rant, have a recent study which shows a rather amusing fact: the cost of generating an AI image is less than the cost of a human producing it. Because you know, you kinda forgot the part where a human has to use a computer for hours on end and have it do calculations in digital art programs (much less instantaneous energy usage than high power GPU for sure, art programs are more of a slow burn on the CPU which will accumulate over time).
A single AI image of course not really “worth” something an artist spends a lot of time (right now at least) so one could say the true cost in producing comparable quality results is more similar when factoring in inpainting and other image manipulation, but yeah for some reason people just ignore the energy cost of humans themselves (your brain is not free to run) and the digital art programs they use to produce art. We could always go back to putting paint on paper too and avoid this problem, but I doubt you’ll convince many people of that. By your logic we should probably ban humans from doing digital art too since it costs too much energy, but it’s a good thing we don’t live in that world.
