Comment by recitedropper
17 hours ago
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.
> The existence of existing harmful norms does not, ex ante, justify introducing additional harmful norms
The point isn't to justify anything.
It's to put things into perspective, and give people a more informed and holistic point of view, and then to ask them to reconsider their opinions in light of more information. There's nothing bad about that. In fact it's a good thing.
Especially in a world where people are so easily misled by others who cherrypick unexceptional statistics and then intentionally present them as exceptional in order to generate outrage, retweets, clicks, whatever.
It's a combination of argument from analogy and reductio ad absurdum. It's not a fallacy. You're free to dispute the validity of the analogy, or you can dispute the absurdity, which you did, by confirming that you would indeed love carbon receipts for everything.
selective outrage, on the other hand, already has a name.
What's the goal of complaining about it though? What's more likely, you persuade people to stop all of these habits that use electricity that burns carbon, or you convert the electricity supply to renewables?
But is fairness between carbon uses justified? Or we cut the line at some point.
> Someone needs to name this fallacy.
Whataboutism?
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Considering that especially leftists have spent literal decades hating on vegans for telling them about their individual footprint, there is no real fallacy here.
AI haters have somehow discovered personal responsibility. Awesome. They've never ever applied that to anything else they PERSONALLY do, though. It's only things others do. For any personal choices, suddenly it's all the governments fault or the corporations fault. No personal responsibility to be seen.
My 5-ish years of veganism have easily made up for a life time of prompting. Yet, I still would never generate video or images in part because of their impact.
How many of you non-vegan AI haters are going to be vegan now?
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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.
Meat is particularly ironic because it uses an obscene amount of water. Even worse, a lot of the feed for cattle comes from the imperial valley in CA, which has first dibs on the Colorado River, which is on the verge of collapsing. Obviously they aren't cutting usage.
But datacenters using water is what the public needs to fear...
Which is, BTW, a funny way of thinking of living creatures.
Jeez where did the vegan touch you?
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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?
It is because you know this and you continually choose to keep using it.
It’s be like if your 2001 BMW car was super fuel efficient, and then for whatever reason the 2028 model guzzled gas and you chose to buy it anyway
Just because the thing you did once upon a time was efficient, does not mean you have a lifetime pass to engage with it no matter the updated circumstances
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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.
You must have your units really messed up because there's no way that's right. A GPU drawing 700W for 10s would be 1.9444 Wh or 0.0019444 kWh and that's if the GPU was only serving your image gen for the whole 10s which is unlikely, most of the time is probably queuing since even a much lower powered GPU in a desktop PC can generate the same image in well under 10s.
Do you have a source for 1-2.5kWh for 10s of content? It takes about a minute or two to generate, so you'd be talking about a GPU consuming 30_000W-150_000W, it's just not possible. Even if it was distributed (which I don't think it is), that'd be 30-100 datacenter GPUs running at 100% to generate one clip? There's no way that would make financial sense.
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).
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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.