Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and particularly not unsubstantive + negative ones, which kill the kind of discussion we're hoping to have here (i.e. curious and thoughtful).
What? He quotes the opening line of the article, and notes that he reacts negatively to it. Interpreting his sentiment as "curmudgeonly" is a clear exaggeration.
And sure--it isn't a high-substance comment, but it isn't irrelevant either. It was, for a while, the top-voted comment on this whole thread. That shows people resonate with the thought, and it obviously sparked quite a lot of discussion.
This seriously makes me question your, and our other moderators, motivations. Sad times.
This was not a borderline call! The GP comment is not in keeping with the kind of discussion we're hoping for, especially not at the top of a thread—which unfortunately is where cheap negative comments often end up.
The problem isn't primarily with the comment, and in that sense conradludgate did nothing wrong. The problem is the upvotes. If it weren't for those, such comments wouldn't rise to the top and choke out more interesting conversation. But they routinely do, and that's one of the biggest problems we have here.
This i did like 15 images just today, mostly just editing and fixing one of my wifes photos that she wanted the lighting and stuff leaned up with so i decided to test out 2.5... it did a great job, but that was easily 15 images 1 of which was the end result but all 15 count toward that figure, i'd honestly guess its more 1:100-1:500 that actually makes it outside the chatgpt servers
The 'environmental' consideration is much less than the argument over 'paper or plastic'.
That's going to be an issue of regulation and cost - not some arbitrary decision over 'whether I should make an image or just use text'.
Second - there are really not much in the way 'social or moral implications' for the most part.
This is a dystopian delusion that I'm hinting at here.
Folks are blowing this way out of proportion, and cynically so.
People now have 'automated Photoshop' and a slightly more power to express themselves. It's not going to change that much, and it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing. Mildly.
It is 100% not. You can create a whole lot of misinformation with an image. You cannot do that by visiting a website. To dismiss the concern with “people are having fun” is, at best, a naive idea and, at worst, a deliberately deceitful and malicious comment.
I hate it because I hate having to look at these AI generated images. In fact I want an internet where I have to explicitly opt-in to see AI generated content in general.
I was watching a friend stream a dead game lately.
That game was developed before generating images became widespread, and sunset as that "art form" started really taking off (game-as-a-service... probably partly reverse engineered and retooled with AI too). So during its lifetime, it was pretty much AI free.
I remember having been seduced by that game's art style at the time. It wasn't "the usual guys with futuristic guns and armor", it had some stylization as well, nice color...
Watching the stream, it occurred to me that it was in fact artwork from "the days before", in a way I hadn't been hit with until that point, even as a returning artist looking at pre-AI works.
"People came up with the concepts and developed and rendered them themselves", I thought to myself. Not in a "oh look, floppy disks. How quaint!" way, either.
I would imagine a lot of it is mundane shit like getting ChatGPT to render the same room with different coloured walls or provide inspiration on plant pots. I have a decent amount of image usage and it's all things like this, not generating content I intend to distribute.
Yeah seriously, the cultural mindset is so damn kneejerk negative to everything right now. It's pathetic. This is an exciting time, and lots of good things are happening.
Maybe? Transformers and neural networks in general can do lots of interesting things for sure. But an image with the default ChatGPT aesthetic mindlessly produced by a generic prompt isn't one of them.
Seriously, it’s so fucking lame and boring to read these cynical takes. I might just make a HN comment that filters these people out, they’re ruining the site.
To be clear, I don’t mind a well-reasoned negative take on something, but much of the negatives takes I see here these days isn’t much better than Reddit, just hyper-exaggerated bitching and moaning about everything.
The weirdly narrow and cynical purview of your example proves my point.
It echos sentiments of painters, intellectuals and odd religious moralists and other rabble rousers who spent decades raving against 'tHe eVIL pHoToGRaPH' in late 19th and early 20t century.
People can now make more expressive images than they could before, which is generally a good thing.
Of course, people could always use new technology for negative purposes - and - people have been using Photoshop for decades already to make 'fake nudes' - this is not a new phenomenon.
None of this is even a very big deal. We can make images now much more easily, that's it.
> imagine being someone being blackmailed by photos created by ChatGPT Images
If anything, the fact that I know for a fact that I can, in 45 seconds, generate an image of any arbitrary person holding Solo cups at a party arm in arm with Vladimir Putin (to crib an idea from one of the demos) should make everyone less and less susceptible to blackmail in general - in fact, even if the source material is real! There was a time 40 years ago when a photograph's existence was considered proof of a fact - the existence of Photoshop-like tools made that into a weak proof, and the existence of genAI has made "a photograph" into a format that is known to be as malleable as a .txt file.
Whether we like that or not, no one will stop bad actors from attempting to abuse this technology, so democratizing its use does help people to understand how they work and make potential victims much less credulous.
this is an oddly dismissive comment that says more about the commenter then what is commented on.
generating an ai image is vastly more costly than loading a webpage…but still not that costly compared to most other things.
this is depressing in the same way content slop or fyp feeds are fun.
if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver. it will be only slightly more expensive and likely far more exciting for kids as they have to wait for the dopamine hit.
"if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver. it will be only slightly more expensive and likely far more exciting for kids as "
???
You mean to imply there's something 'more authentic' about paying $5 for a random Philippino guy to use Photoshop to mix-up some family photos with sticker overlays?
What are you even talking about?
On what level is that either more authentic, better for the environment, more novel ... of frankly better in any way?
That is 'not even an argument' - and so you're making my point for me:
People can now make images.
It's mostly for fun, some of it will be used professional, some Tweets will be a bit more visual - but that's it.
It's not going to change that much, and it's generally better on the whole for people to be able to create what they want.
People are putting this out of proportion.
Maybe I'm too old, but I've been around - this is not a big deal in the grand scheme.
>if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver. it will be only slightly more expensive and likely far more exciting for kids as they have to wait for the dopamine hit.
Or, y'know, learn how to draw, or accept that it's not exactly going to be Chuck Jones caliber stuff.
Yea, “fun”, sure. I’m sure none of those billions of images were used to lie, mislead, or cheat anyone. I’m sure none of those images were used to create fake news narratives, used in advertisements to bait people into buying fake products, or create misleading mockups of rental properties. Definitely not.
Nevermind the fact that the examples in OpenAI’s blog post are examples of creating images that have no plausible purpose other than to fake stuff that didn’t happen.
Yesterday my wife used ChatGPT to generate an image of our cat as a toilet, which was very funny for the both of us. She's also used it to turn him into a basketball getting dunked, a tsetse fly, a clown and a napkin. It's hard to say whether she uses it more to generate inside joke images about our cat, or to generate mockup plans and layouts for her flower gardens, but it is safe to say she does it all for fun.
The sheer waste that accompanies image and video genAI is actually terrifying.
I challenge OpenAI to put a "your carbon footprint" field next to each generation. If you have nothing to hide, more information is surely better, right?
Every SDXL image uses something like 0.5 Watt-hour. That means that 2000 sdxl images uses about 30 cents of electricity. If we multiply that by 30x for video (a fair assumption for models like minimax H3, which take that much longer to make video), that means you get almost 700 5-second videos for a dollar of electricity, which is about a kilo of carbon dioxide. More or less depending on where your electricity comes from.
> If we multiply that by 30x for video (a fair assumption for models like minimax H3, which take that much longer to make video)
It takes about 7 minutes for my RTX 5090 to generate a 15 second video with MiniMax H3. At 600 watts, that's 252,000 watt-seconds, or 0.07 kilowatt-hours.
My electricity is 18 cents/kWh, so $0.0126. Just a little over a penny.
Someone needs to name this fallacy. The existence of existing harmful norms does not, ex ante, justify introducing additional harmful norms. I propose naming it the "GenAI Defender Fallacy".
Separately--yes, I would love carbon receipts for everything. Such a system would be fascinating and do real good in this world.
Bad examples. Use meat consumption. It will blow any other kind of "non-essential" resource use out of the water, on ALL fronts.
It's really hard to believe that people care about the personal impact of their decisions, when it's only ever other peoples decisions that get talked about.
that would be actually pretty cool and would cause more awareness for a lot of people. but something like this would go in both directions i am afraid, as with everything there surely would be people trying to do carbonmaxxing just for the sake of it, kind of like breaking a highscore. i am sure people like this already exist anyway, though.
reddit used to shared how much gold purchases went towards their server costs (pretty sure it wasn't 100% accurate but at least good to an order of magnitude). It was approximately $1/hour and they served ~100M monthly active users. So I don't think those metrics would demonstrate how wasteful traditional data centers are like you think it would.
this would be amazing, absolutely. Especially if they were able to see specifically where my power comes from, the embedded carbon in the chipsets used to serve my requests, all the costs associated with the datacenter(s), etc. A weekly breakdown would be excellent.
I propose they use my body for compost to power their electricity turbines, in exchange for a advance in tokens while I am alive...I am overweight and that is good, more burning mass. We could settle at 2 million USD.
A round trip cross country plane ride for one passenger is equivalent to about 500k - 1 million image generations. So all one has to do to offset their lifetime usage of image generators is forego one vacation. And this of course is only for current day carbon usage, that could go down (or up I guess but compute-wise usually things get cheaper over time).
The waste overall for data centers is beyond terrifying. Enough water for 1.2 billion people. It’s like all the GenX and Boomers looked at the challenges younger people will face and decided make it as bad as possible start kicking them in the ribs for good measure.
I know of entire media departments that went from - let’s hire an artist and see what they come up with to - let’s produce hundreds if not thousands of images to explore all possible ideas (and end up with something bland anyway).
Do you want to know how many identical questions ChatGPT gets asked every week, recomputing its answer each time because people stopped sharing results? I don't, but I'm sure it far exceeds 3 billion. "How to center a div", "how to install this and that package", "what is this pop culture reference", "who is this famous person",...
I ask a question to google and i spend 10-100 times longer visiting multiple websites making multiple servers generate webpages wasting electricity and time reading them finding my answer, trying different solutions
Sounds like a complex question. On average you'll visit like 1.5 sites. Those SQL queries are peanuts compared to an LLM burning through tokens. Besides, for hard questions, the LLM itself might download 30-60 websites to find the info on your behalf, e.g. checking the state of RAM prices.
I’m doing renovation . I slap a prompt in a tile store over my room and design several types of tiles and paint from one prompt while causally browsing in almost real time .
Isn’t that the future ? I generated 200 images alone in this use case .
What’s the alternative to that ? Send it tomorrow someone who hate their job moving tiles in the toilet , may money , wait 1 week
Groan. Your comment is the most depressing thing I've read today. What a sad way to look at the world. People are doing stuff and having fun. Meanwhile a whole sub-cult is sucking from the doom straw and mumbling carbon, water, greed, blah. The sport of Golf consumes far more resources than any AI data center.
We need more green spaces, we need people to be active. Golf is a fairly quite sport, animals do foster around the greenery with golf courses. I would much rather a golf course than hot concrete everywhere.
the golf stat is actually way worse than this... because you aren't accounting for active users. how many people
actually benefit from all that water.
a golf course... at BEST has two or three foursomes on each hole on average at a time. so 36-48 players concurrently. accounting for less than perfect utilization it rounds to a rough throughput of about 1000 people per day per course. winter Exists and so you probably get like 20-50k people per year.
or maybe an easier term would be the estimated 160m people who played golf at least once last year.
which means that not only are we using that much water for so few people (.002% of the population) we are also reserving all of that space for so few people. for courses out in the middle of nowhere that doesn't matter but for example are thousands of acres of courses inside and near cities. one in LA reported 117k visits one year and that required dawn to dusk 365 play only possible in a climate like LA.
A typical course is ~150 acres so we could fit 50 soccer fields into that same space and service 3.2 million players. Ill spare the envelope math but its pretty hard to come up
with any other use for that space/water that could serve less people.
ok one more example that doesn't need water either. just up the street from the high volume golf course is runyon canyon. similar size 150 acres, serves 1.5m visits a year.
Basically golf is a major waste of resources for very little benefit in basically every way possible, and should be zoned out of existence.
I’m not commenting on whether generative AI is especially resource-wasteful or not, but a lot of people online seem to have newly discovered the existence of data centers.
That's fair and I left it as is knowing that. But it was still factually correct.
The main point is people worrying about resources and how to allocate them. We are creatures who want joy and I will not apologize for that. Certainly in face of abstract things such as "the environment". Which environment? I am a humanist. That definition varies. Golf is not the problem sorry to pick on it!
I was curious and tried to come up with a crude estimate - all of the golf courses in the US use approximately the same amount of energy (mowing, fertilizer, etc) as one 1GW DC does.
Lol. Let's not pick on golf? All sports are pointless depending on how you look at them. But here we are thousands and thousands of years later and humans want what humans want.
to be fair you need to create a dozen images to get a decent one. Many times i need to get to almost what i want using paint.net and hope chatgpt removes the aliasing/cleans up the pixel boundaries without messing anything up - i'm not complaining though, still faster and cleaner than photoshop -- when it works
This is really depressing to me. I think this is abusive.
Your son has no concept of the implications of his body, face and identifying features being used here. He has no ability to opt-out, refuse consent, and avoid his data (biometric features) being swooped up in a data-centers for further training, further data collection & further monetization.
Your son didn't agree to the privacy policy of OpenAI. This is an extremely high level of disrespect to a person you created.
If you're not familiar of the pitfalls of this tech, and the fact that there are more ethical tools with which to do those things, I'm not sure what to tell you.
Some people feel the need to attach an image to almost everything the post - even in chat rooms (including slack at work). These images serve no purpose, but the poster feels it is useful - though it was often reaction gifs in the past I'm seeing a lot more AI content than I ever saw reaction gifs, maybe because of novelty or maybe because it's ultra personalised.
Sometimes images help to visualise something or to get a point across, but I see so many people who think it's necessary to reply to a discord message with a cat with human limbs doing a dance, or a photo of "themselves" climbing a mountain with the Rust logo to show them mastering Rust... Ok?
Image models are useful and I'm thankful for much better visual reasoning but it really really frustrates me the constant need to burn money for all of this slop.
>Generating 1,000 images with a powerful AI model, such as Stable Diffusion XL, is responsible for roughly as much carbon dioxide as driving the equivalent of 4.1 miles in an average gasoline-powered car. In contrast, the least carbon-intensive text generation model they examined was responsible for as much CO2 as driving 0.0006 miles in a similar vehicle
Not sure you can compare huge ML clusters of GPUs running models in order to do these images, and the typical "meme generator" which is basically a call to imagemagick passing an image and some text.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and particularly not unsubstantive + negative ones, which kill the kind of discussion we're hoping to have here (i.e. curious and thoughtful).
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one:
"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
What? He quotes the opening line of the article, and notes that he reacts negatively to it. Interpreting his sentiment as "curmudgeonly" is a clear exaggeration.
And sure--it isn't a high-substance comment, but it isn't irrelevant either. It was, for a while, the top-voted comment on this whole thread. That shows people resonate with the thought, and it obviously sparked quite a lot of discussion.
This seriously makes me question your, and our other moderators, motivations. Sad times.
This was not a borderline call! The GP comment is not in keeping with the kind of discussion we're hoping for, especially not at the top of a thread—which unfortunately is where cheap negative comments often end up.
The problem isn't primarily with the comment, and in that sense conradludgate did nothing wrong. The problem is the upvotes. If it weren't for those, such comments wouldn't rise to the top and choke out more interesting conversation. But they routinely do, and that's one of the biggest problems we have here.
This an oddly cynical comment, that I think says more about the observer than the observed.
People are having fun making images.
Like they do all sorts of things on the web.
Making an image is as simple as visiting a web-page.
That's it.
This i did like 15 images just today, mostly just editing and fixing one of my wifes photos that she wanted the lighting and stuff leaned up with so i decided to test out 2.5... it did a great job, but that was easily 15 images 1 of which was the end result but all 15 count toward that figure, i'd honestly guess its more 1:100-1:500 that actually makes it outside the chatgpt servers
This is the most normal thing, and this is the best example
AI is: 'my wife wanted better lighting in our reno pic thingy'
This is healthy and way in the range of normal, not dystopian.
3 replies →
If twitter and reddit have demonstrated anything is that the fun people are having with image generation is not healthy.
How so? I don't have twitter or reddit, what are people doing?
9 replies →
I know, right? And the worst part is, they didn't check with you first.
> That's it.
Yeah ignoring the massive environmental, social, and moral implications I suppose it’s not a big deal at all.
The 'environmental' consideration is much less than the argument over 'paper or plastic'.
That's going to be an issue of regulation and cost - not some arbitrary decision over 'whether I should make an image or just use text'.
Second - there are really not much in the way 'social or moral implications' for the most part.
This is a dystopian delusion that I'm hinting at here.
Folks are blowing this way out of proportion, and cynically so.
People now have 'automated Photoshop' and a slightly more power to express themselves. It's not going to change that much, and it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing. Mildly.
7 replies →
oh no... it's fun... you got us...
It is 100% not. You can create a whole lot of misinformation with an image. You cannot do that by visiting a website. To dismiss the concern with “people are having fun” is, at best, a naive idea and, at worst, a deliberately deceitful and malicious comment.
Here is a guy tweaking photos of 'girls on a beach' in 1990 with Photoshop, which anyone can use to do, relatively easily ...
... for almost the last 40 years
"a deliberately deceitful and malicious comment."
This is a 'lost contact with reality' type of thing to say.
This thread is not about AI, it's entirely about people's ability to ground reality.
[1] https://petapixel.com/2015/02/20/a-blast-from-the-past-demos...
1 reply →
I hate it because I hate having to look at these AI generated images. In fact I want an internet where I have to explicitly opt-in to see AI generated content in general.
I was watching a friend stream a dead game lately.
That game was developed before generating images became widespread, and sunset as that "art form" started really taking off (game-as-a-service... probably partly reverse engineered and retooled with AI too). So during its lifetime, it was pretty much AI free.
I remember having been seduced by that game's art style at the time. It wasn't "the usual guys with futuristic guns and armor", it had some stylization as well, nice color...
Watching the stream, it occurred to me that it was in fact artwork from "the days before", in a way I hadn't been hit with until that point, even as a returning artist looking at pre-AI works.
"People came up with the concepts and developed and rendered them themselves", I thought to myself. Not in a "oh look, floppy disks. How quaint!" way, either.
Weird feeling.
2 replies →
I would imagine a lot of it is mundane shit like getting ChatGPT to render the same room with different coloured walls or provide inspiration on plant pots. I have a decent amount of image usage and it's all things like this, not generating content I intend to distribute.
Yeah seriously, the cultural mindset is so damn kneejerk negative to everything right now. It's pathetic. This is an exciting time, and lots of good things are happening.
Maybe? Transformers and neural networks in general can do lots of interesting things for sure. But an image with the default ChatGPT aesthetic mindlessly produced by a generic prompt isn't one of them.
Seriously, it’s so fucking lame and boring to read these cynical takes. I might just make a HN comment that filters these people out, they’re ruining the site.
To be clear, I don’t mind a well-reasoned negative take on something, but much of the negatives takes I see here these days isn’t much better than Reddit, just hyper-exaggerated bitching and moaning about everything.
[dead]
[flagged]
The weirdly narrow and cynical purview of your example proves my point.
It echos sentiments of painters, intellectuals and odd religious moralists and other rabble rousers who spent decades raving against 'tHe eVIL pHoToGRaPH' in late 19th and early 20t century.
People can now make more expressive images than they could before, which is generally a good thing.
Of course, people could always use new technology for negative purposes - and - people have been using Photoshop for decades already to make 'fake nudes' - this is not a new phenomenon.
None of this is even a very big deal. We can make images now much more easily, that's it.
> imagine being someone being blackmailed by photos created by ChatGPT Images
If anything, the fact that I know for a fact that I can, in 45 seconds, generate an image of any arbitrary person holding Solo cups at a party arm in arm with Vladimir Putin (to crib an idea from one of the demos) should make everyone less and less susceptible to blackmail in general - in fact, even if the source material is real! There was a time 40 years ago when a photograph's existence was considered proof of a fact - the existence of Photoshop-like tools made that into a weak proof, and the existence of genAI has made "a photograph" into a format that is known to be as malleable as a .txt file.
Whether we like that or not, no one will stop bad actors from attempting to abuse this technology, so democratizing its use does help people to understand how they work and make potential victims much less credulous.
this is an oddly dismissive comment that says more about the commenter then what is commented on.
generating an ai image is vastly more costly than loading a webpage…but still not that costly compared to most other things.
this is depressing in the same way content slop or fyp feeds are fun.
if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver. it will be only slightly more expensive and likely far more exciting for kids as they have to wait for the dopamine hit.
> if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver.
Incredible alternative. Talk about depressing.
"if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver. it will be only slightly more expensive and likely far more exciting for kids as "
???
You mean to imply there's something 'more authentic' about paying $5 for a random Philippino guy to use Photoshop to mix-up some family photos with sticker overlays?
What are you even talking about?
On what level is that either more authentic, better for the environment, more novel ... of frankly better in any way?
That is 'not even an argument' - and so you're making my point for me:
People can now make images.
It's mostly for fun, some of it will be used professional, some Tweets will be a bit more visual - but that's it.
It's not going to change that much, and it's generally better on the whole for people to be able to create what they want.
People are putting this out of proportion.
Maybe I'm too old, but I've been around - this is not a big deal in the grand scheme.
And it's 'net slightly positive'.
>if you want a silly pic with ur kids, just pay someone on fiver. it will be only slightly more expensive and likely far more exciting for kids as they have to wait for the dopamine hit.
Or, y'know, learn how to draw, or accept that it's not exactly going to be Chuck Jones caliber stuff.
its not “oddly” and u know full well
>People are having fun making images.
3 billion images per week isn't people, it's automated farms, dogshit marketing companies and other attacks on your brain.
All of it?
What percentage is benign?
Do you have a source?
2 replies →
They're having fun asking a robot to make a picture when they could have learned to make it themselves.
It's incredibly depressing.
Yea, “fun”, sure. I’m sure none of those billions of images were used to lie, mislead, or cheat anyone. I’m sure none of those images were used to create fake news narratives, used in advertisements to bait people into buying fake products, or create misleading mockups of rental properties. Definitely not.
Nevermind the fact that the examples in OpenAI’s blog post are examples of creating images that have no plausible purpose other than to fake stuff that didn’t happen.
But yea sure, it’s all just “for fun”. Sure.
Yesterday my wife used ChatGPT to generate an image of our cat as a toilet, which was very funny for the both of us. She's also used it to turn him into a basketball getting dunked, a tsetse fly, a clown and a napkin. It's hard to say whether she uses it more to generate inside joke images about our cat, or to generate mockup plans and layouts for her flower gardens, but it is safe to say she does it all for fun.
1 reply →
Do you purposefully not use any products that could be used to do anything harmful?
A hammer is great for pushing nails into wood. It also can crack someone’s skull with efficiency. I’m assuming you do not use hammers then, right?
Knives are freely sold at shops on every street.
...making a kitten tangled up on a networking cabinet was fun.
Some of us find opportunities for the small joys that help offset the background radiation of despair.
The sheer waste that accompanies image and video genAI is actually terrifying.
I challenge OpenAI to put a "your carbon footprint" field next to each generation. If you have nothing to hide, more information is surely better, right?
Every SDXL image uses something like 0.5 Watt-hour. That means that 2000 sdxl images uses about 30 cents of electricity. If we multiply that by 30x for video (a fair assumption for models like minimax H3, which take that much longer to make video), that means you get almost 700 5-second videos for a dollar of electricity, which is about a kilo of carbon dioxide. More or less depending on where your electricity comes from.
> If we multiply that by 30x for video (a fair assumption for models like minimax H3, which take that much longer to make video)
It takes about 7 minutes for my RTX 5090 to generate a 15 second video with MiniMax H3. At 600 watts, that's 252,000 watt-seconds, or 0.07 kilowatt-hours.
My electricity is 18 cents/kWh, so $0.0126. Just a little over a penny.
No way gpt-image-2 is as cheap as SDXL. (I dont concern about gpt-image-2's consumption either, just pointing out it's not a good comparison)
People always napkin math something low, and then every academic who formally studies it ends up with a much higher estimate.
I await OpenAI's carbon footprint field.
would you like a carbon receipt for your video gaems, netflix, and reddit sessions?
Someone needs to name this fallacy. The existence of existing harmful norms does not, ex ante, justify introducing additional harmful norms. I propose naming it the "GenAI Defender Fallacy".
Separately--yes, I would love carbon receipts for everything. Such a system would be fascinating and do real good in this world.
17 replies →
Bad examples. Use meat consumption. It will blow any other kind of "non-essential" resource use out of the water, on ALL fronts.
It's really hard to believe that people care about the personal impact of their decisions, when it's only ever other peoples decisions that get talked about.
4 replies →
I personally would love them
that would be actually pretty cool and would cause more awareness for a lot of people. but something like this would go in both directions i am afraid, as with everything there surely would be people trying to do carbonmaxxing just for the sake of it, kind of like breaking a highscore. i am sure people like this already exist anyway, though.
And when my "Reddit energy consumption" rose because they migrated from old.reddit.com, to their new bloated frontend, that's _my fault_, right?
2 replies →
reddit used to shared how much gold purchases went towards their server costs (pretty sure it wasn't 100% accurate but at least good to an order of magnitude). It was approximately $1/hour and they served ~100M monthly active users. So I don't think those metrics would demonstrate how wasteful traditional data centers are like you think it would.
I'd love that. What if anything entertainment was required by law to have some value like that, with a standardized calculation?
this would be amazing, absolutely. Especially if they were able to see specifically where my power comes from, the embedded carbon in the chipsets used to serve my requests, all the costs associated with the datacenter(s), etc. A weekly breakdown would be excellent.
Absolutely, I'd love to see how tiny they are in comparison.
If said game, video, or social media site used 1-2.5 kWh of electricity for every 10s of content then I'd say definitely!
Thankfully web browsing is no where near that.
2 replies →
Sure, why not.
_This comment increased sea levels by 0.000000000003m_
Yes.
even the whataboutism is slop
You can generate images on 5060ti, it'd take less than minute per image. Trivial environmental footprint.
I propose they use my body for compost to power their electricity turbines, in exchange for a advance in tokens while I am alive...I am overweight and that is good, more burning mass. We could settle at 2 million USD.
If they could harness the energy from all your atoms it would be worth significantly more than 2 million.
About the same amount of energy per image as a second of hot shower.
Is it fundamentally different to burning wood just to enjoy watching the flames?
A round trip cross country plane ride for one passenger is equivalent to about 500k - 1 million image generations. So all one has to do to offset their lifetime usage of image generators is forego one vacation. And this of course is only for current day carbon usage, that could go down (or up I guess but compute-wise usually things get cheaper over time).
[dead]
The waste overall for data centers is beyond terrifying. Enough water for 1.2 billion people. It’s like all the GenX and Boomers looked at the challenges younger people will face and decided make it as bad as possible start kicking them in the ribs for good measure.
Theres going to be a reckoning.
You understand that any water used is not destroyed, right?
Where does the concern for all that water go?
Most are closed systems. Water gets recycled. Water gets used like bathtubs and water bottles, right?
You cannot believe water is destroyed.
I know of entire media departments that went from - let’s hire an artist and see what they come up with to - let’s produce hundreds if not thousands of images to explore all possible ideas (and end up with something bland anyway).
Do you want to know how many identical questions ChatGPT gets asked every week, recomputing its answer each time because people stopped sharing results? I don't, but I'm sure it far exceeds 3 billion. "How to center a div", "how to install this and that package", "what is this pop culture reference", "who is this famous person",...
I ask a question to ChatGPT and i get an answer.
I ask a question to google and i spend 10-100 times longer visiting multiple websites making multiple servers generate webpages wasting electricity and time reading them finding my answer, trying different solutions
Sounds like a complex question. On average you'll visit like 1.5 sites. Those SQL queries are peanuts compared to an LLM burning through tokens. Besides, for hard questions, the LLM itself might download 30-60 websites to find the info on your behalf, e.g. checking the state of RAM prices.
OpenAI does cache the most frequent questions like this.
There is no way to cache the answer to questions that differ by even one token reliably without introducing potential problems.
3 replies →
Doubtful. Considering features like memory, response style, custom system instructions, etc. can heavy alter a users output.
Imagine if they used the stackoverflow model of "closed as dupe"
Reading the comments here is worse.
Why? Because you disagree with them? Would you rather it be an echo chamber?
It's like I am on Reddit or Facebook.
I’m doing renovation . I slap a prompt in a tile store over my room and design several types of tiles and paint from one prompt while causally browsing in almost real time .
Isn’t that the future ? I generated 200 images alone in this use case .
What’s the alternative to that ? Send it tomorrow someone who hate their job moving tiles in the toilet , may money , wait 1 week
In my home city, I started to see banners all made with AI.
From my kids schools to banners for food places.
Groan. Your comment is the most depressing thing I've read today. What a sad way to look at the world. People are doing stuff and having fun. Meanwhile a whole sub-cult is sucking from the doom straw and mumbling carbon, water, greed, blah. The sport of Golf consumes far more resources than any AI data center.
Wow, just a quick check .... it appears you are correct.
Indirect Water footprint via Electricity Usage:
I don't really get the golf course hate.
We need more green spaces, we need people to be active. Golf is a fairly quite sport, animals do foster around the greenery with golf courses. I would much rather a golf course than hot concrete everywhere.
3 replies →
the golf stat is actually way worse than this... because you aren't accounting for active users. how many people actually benefit from all that water.
a golf course... at BEST has two or three foursomes on each hole on average at a time. so 36-48 players concurrently. accounting for less than perfect utilization it rounds to a rough throughput of about 1000 people per day per course. winter Exists and so you probably get like 20-50k people per year.
or maybe an easier term would be the estimated 160m people who played golf at least once last year.
which means that not only are we using that much water for so few people (.002% of the population) we are also reserving all of that space for so few people. for courses out in the middle of nowhere that doesn't matter but for example are thousands of acres of courses inside and near cities. one in LA reported 117k visits one year and that required dawn to dusk 365 play only possible in a climate like LA.
A typical course is ~150 acres so we could fit 50 soccer fields into that same space and service 3.2 million players. Ill spare the envelope math but its pretty hard to come up with any other use for that space/water that could serve less people.
ok one more example that doesn't need water either. just up the street from the high volume golf course is runyon canyon. similar size 150 acres, serves 1.5m visits a year.
Basically golf is a major waste of resources for very little benefit in basically every way possible, and should be zoned out of existence.
3 replies →
[deleted]
I’m not commenting on whether generative AI is especially resource-wasteful or not, but a lot of people online seem to have newly discovered the existence of data centers.
Remind me what golf club comes close to the energy consumption of a data center?
Or do you literally mean the entire sport of golf vs 1 data center?
That's fair and I left it as is knowing that. But it was still factually correct.
The main point is people worrying about resources and how to allocate them. We are creatures who want joy and I will not apologize for that. Certainly in face of abstract things such as "the environment". Which environment? I am a humanist. That definition varies. Golf is not the problem sorry to pick on it!
I was curious and tried to come up with a crude estimate - all of the golf courses in the US use approximately the same amount of energy (mowing, fertilizer, etc) as one 1GW DC does.
4 replies →
Okay, but firstly golf is probably the most useless sport ever and secondly there is more than one AI datacenter.
Yes, some people have fun, but most of the "fun" nowadays is just endless mindless consumption.
Golf consumes more water than ALL datacenters on earth.
1 reply →
How people derive fun is different from person to person.
3 replies →
Lol. Let's not pick on golf? All sports are pointless depending on how you look at them. But here we are thousands and thousands of years later and humans want what humans want.
I just ignore most of these people. 99.9% of the time they're losers who peddle misinformation.
to be fair you need to create a dozen images to get a decent one. Many times i need to get to almost what i want using paint.net and hope chatgpt removes the aliasing/cleans up the pixel boundaries without messing anything up - i'm not complaining though, still faster and cleaner than photoshop -- when it works
Must be early. Try the news.
Insert "Quit Having Fun" meme here.
Why?
May I ask why this is “most depressing thing I have read today”.
Concerns about misinformation? Compute/energy use? Creative work Replaced by AI?
Having a lot of fun with my son using an image of him and dressing him in all kinds of costumes. How is that depressing to you?
Didn't you hear? you must hire a real artist to do that for you or you're exploiting the industry
This is really depressing to me. I think this is abusive.
Your son has no concept of the implications of his body, face and identifying features being used here. He has no ability to opt-out, refuse consent, and avoid his data (biometric features) being swooped up in a data-centers for further training, further data collection & further monetization.
Your son didn't agree to the privacy policy of OpenAI. This is an extremely high level of disrespect to a person you created.
You're insane.
If you're not familiar of the pitfalls of this tech, and the fact that there are more ethical tools with which to do those things, I'm not sure what to tell you.
If you want to discuss a matter, it would be nice to spell out your point of view.
How is the person supposed to know your opposing point of view if you don't tell it?
What are some of the more ethical tools? I would like to check them out
I think @conradludgate was alluding to that we have so much of AI slop these days.
But I see your point too. I too like to generate cute and funny images and share it with my friends and family.
But this being done at scale can lead to overall degradation of the online experience.
The slop is what upsets me the most right now.
Some people feel the need to attach an image to almost everything the post - even in chat rooms (including slack at work). These images serve no purpose, but the poster feels it is useful - though it was often reaction gifs in the past I'm seeing a lot more AI content than I ever saw reaction gifs, maybe because of novelty or maybe because it's ultra personalised.
Sometimes images help to visualise something or to get a point across, but I see so many people who think it's necessary to reply to a discord message with a cat with human limbs doing a dance, or a photo of "themselves" climbing a mountain with the Rust logo to show them mastering Rust... Ok?
Image models are useful and I'm thankful for much better visual reasoning but it really really frustrates me the constant need to burn money for all of this slop.
plus the energy cost - https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-a...
>Generating 1,000 images with a powerful AI model, such as Stable Diffusion XL, is responsible for roughly as much carbon dioxide as driving the equivalent of 4.1 miles in an average gasoline-powered car. In contrast, the least carbon-intensive text generation model they examined was responsible for as much CO2 as driving 0.0006 miles in a similar vehicle
11 replies →
Its a simple way to feel superior - to sneer at normal people having fun and using technology.
[dead]
[flagged]
2 replies →
You're building a weak strawman here. The author didn't call you nor your son out specifically.
I wouldn't feel comfortable uploading a picture of my child to OpenAI servers (for fun nonetheless), but you do you.
I'm not following the news. Why should we not upload pictures of family members to OpenAI? Are any other cloud providers safe?
1 reply →
I wouldn't be uploading pics of my child to platforms that have historically used CSAM to train their models, but hey you do you
Typical HN luddite mindset at this point. This is an exciting time!
How many memes/gifs do you think have been created by hand or with generators over the last ~20 years?
Not sure you can compare huge ML clusters of GPUs running models in order to do these images, and the typical "meme generator" which is basically a call to imagemagick passing an image and some text.
My point was with respect to brainrot being depressing but existing for a long time before AI. Not resource use.