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 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.

How so? I don't have twitter or reddit, what are people doing?

I know, right? And the worst part is, they didn't check with you first.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

All of it?

What percentage is benign?

Do you have a source?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

Sure, why not.

_This comment increased sea levels by 0.000000000003m_

Yes.

even the whataboutism is slop

If they could harness the energy from all your atoms it would be worth significantly more than 2 million.

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.

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.

There is no way to cache the answer to questions that differ by even one token reliably without introducing potential problems.

Doubtful. Considering features like memory, response style, custom system instructions, etc. can heavy alter a users output.

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.

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.

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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.

Golf consumes more water than ALL datacenters on earth.

How people derive fun is different from person to person.

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.

You're insane.

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

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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

I'm not following the news. Why should we not upload pictures of family members to OpenAI? Are any other cloud providers safe?

My point was with respect to brainrot being depressing but existing for a long time before AI. Not resource use.