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."
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.
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.
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.
AI is: 'my wife wanted better lighting in our reno pic thingy'
This is healthy and way in the range of normal, not dystopian.
I don't understand what is dystopian about this: With the exception of mildly elevated resource consumption to achieve the end goal (a nicer photo), is this not the sort of things that humans have been wanting and doing for as long as photographs have been a thing?
It was previously mostly unachievable for regular people to have their snapshots processed in such a way, but it feels like it's just making what used to be special mildly trivial. Anyone who has had their wedding photographed for the past 20 years has had the photos touched up on the way through. Any school portrait for just as long.
100 years ago people would dodge and burn photographic prints to improve them as much as the technology allowed. This is just the forward evolution of that old tale.
Maybe slightly odd is how anyone could possibly think I was being sarcastic. :)
I'm not attacking you here or anything :)
I'm just a bit shocked at how cynical people can be. The thought would not cross my mind ... and I'm a skeptic of many things!
There's a video somewhere of some people in Wyoming, riding horses.
All of the comments are young people shock of these 'boomers' committing 'animal abuse'.
I mean ... just ranchers riding horses.
People think that 'Ward Cleaver' form 'Leave It To Beaver' is some 'creepy twilight zone figure' ... when he's just literally a nice guy. Or rather the character is.
We're getting way to jaded!
So - I really mean it: AI is going to be mostly very pedantic stuff.
I witnessed the birth of computers and the internet - and while AI is definitely a big deal ... I think it's just going to feel like 'more computing stuff' in the end.
Computers started out for Science - then it became about video games, socialization, design, commerce, and of course 'gambling and porn' and all the 'same vices'.
Every step of the way there were people thinking it was being 'debauched' etc..
AI is going to be about the most mundane things, just as most technology is today.
It will be boring and in the background, and probably weird like a poorly designed, slow web-page full of cruft, but it will 'do the thing'.
Well, that and infographics on what to do when the AI's start to take over.
Yeah ignoring the massive environmental, social, and moral implications I suppose it’s not a big deal at all.
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.
Checks and balances in trust still exist, believe it or not.
More and more people are getting caught up in weird echo chambers, extremist groups, and spewing misinformation. The amount of pure slop on Facebook, either for engagement or manipulation is so high, there is more fake content on FB than real content. The conspiracy side of me believes the CIA is deliberately forcing us against each other, but even if no underlying entity is behind this, the same outcome is happening. This is a byproduct of both Social Media & Generative AI.
Citation needed.
More to the point: both can be bad. We don't let people run stop signs because running red lights is worse.
... 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...
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 forgot that once there existed a magical time when human beings used to write Medium articles by hand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Incredible alternative. Talk about depressing.
???
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'.
Or, y'know, learn how to draw, or accept that it's not exactly going to be Chuck Jones caliber stuff.
3 billion images per week isn't people, it's automated farms, dogshit marketing companies and other attacks on your brain.
What percentage is benign?
Do you have a source?
It's incredibly depressing.
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.
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?
Some of us find opportunities for the small joys that help offset the background radiation of despair.
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?
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.
I await OpenAI's carbon footprint field.
Separately--yes, I would love carbon receipts for everything. Such a system would be fascinating and do real good in this world.
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.
Whataboutism?
If someone says “I think x should stop because of y”. It is a valid argumentative response to say “y also occurs with z, so should z also stop?”. It is argumentatively revealing either hypocrisy, or that the original imperative relies on additional, unstated arguments/assumptions/biases.
Maybe I’m confused, but I thought whataboutism was more like “you are saying I am doing X bad thing? What about Y bad thing you’re doing, let’s discuss that instead”.
It’s a deflection technique, not a check on logical consistency.
> “you are saying I am doing X bad thing? What about Y bad thing you’re doing, let’s discuss that instead”.
often times X is actually bad but human nature is such that no one actually cares about it while wanting to appear to when locked down on it. for this reason arguing about X directly is bad optics.
whataboustism is basically an effort to draw attention to the selective enforcement of norms, laws, morality, whatever. hypocrisy is implied.
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?
I have gone lacto-ovo vegetarian in the past year, so I'll take your 5 years of veganism as inspiration. Otherwise, I welcome people waking up to the harm they cause, regardless of their past hypocrisy.
People are flawed.
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.
But datacenters using water is what the public needs to fear...
No one was talking about the ethical part (which you may or may not agree with). Carbon footprint is an actually measurable quantity that we can compare - what's your problem?
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
Thankfully web browsing is no where near that.
Theres going to be a reckoning.
Most are closed systems. Water gets recycled. Water gets used like bathtubs and water bottles, right?
You cannot believe water is destroyed.
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
(hint : it's not all regex and checksums.)
The rest are nice to haves, but not everyone customizes settings just because they are there so there will be some large pool of users with the defaults who could hit cache without them.
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
From my kids schools to banners for food places.
Golf: ~531 billion gal/year
Data centers: ~17 billion gal/year
Golf ≈ 31× as much
Golf: ~500–531B gallons
Data centers including electricity: ~228B gallonsWe 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.
golf is generally a huge waste of space for the amount of value we get from it per person and should have no place anywhere near a population center where we actually need more green space.
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.
you aren't countering my core point that golf courses is the possibly the worst use of space and basically anything else would serve the same or better utility for way more people.
heck keep it golf but switch to driving ranges and its still like 10x more capacity for users than golf courses.
counter arguments that point out other things that are still 10x better uses of space than golf are not very compelling. a sports arena that serves 2.5m people/year is a terrible argument against a golf course that maxes out at 117k. (using sofi in LA numbers as its a similiar footprint as well 150acres)
im also not saying abolish golf, just only play it in places where the space/water use dont matter. like rural scotland. don't put golf courses in/near cities where we should use our space better.
Or do you literally mean the entire sport of golf vs 1 data center?
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!
The fact is, at this point there is so much demand for DC capacity that the prices are super high, and thus it's worth building them. Many people believe that it's a bubble or whatever. If they're right, well then a lot of people building DCs right now will lose their shirts. If they're wrong and the demand is sustained, DCs are exactly what we need to be building.
It's not really arbitrary though, is it? It's decided by duly-elected representatives who answer to the citizens of the municipality. A government "of the people", etc.
I feel like what you're arguing against is precisely why we have local governments in the first place.
Congress could pass a law tomorrow, or California could pass a ballot measure with a 100% Yes vote, saying (for instance) that some random company now belongs to the government, or to Gavin Newsom personally, or to me, but the courts would still be obligated to strike it down since that grossly violates the Seventh Amendment. Ideas like this are commonly referred to as being checks against "mob rule" - the system recognizes that 'what the people want' isn't necessarily supreme when it runs up against other people's recognized rights.
Yes, some people have fun, but most of the "fun" nowadays is just endless mindless consumption.
Concerns about misinformation? Compute/energy use? Creative work Replaced by AI?
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.
How is the person supposed to know your opposing point of view if you don't tell it?
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.
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
If anything now I feel LESS guilty about usage.
* if we trust the numbers in the other comment
It equals around 0.004% of actual driven miles if my estimates are right.
That is with an estimated ~270 billion miles vehicle miles every week (I put commercial in there.. about ~200 billion miles if you only include passenger vehicles.)
For context that means a days worth of image generation emits about the same amount of carbon dioxide as a single transatlantic flight (New York to London). There are approximately 1500 transatlantic flights per day.
Ours cars are atrocious. We can have the most powerful artificial minds imagine 1000 images from simple prompts, and that takes as much energy as moving a human being 4 miles.
And that will get more energy efficient. Gas cars have barely budged.
Gas cars are the problem, not AI.
(Note, however, that OpenAI's image model is much much larger than SDXL; however, we don't have precise numbers for it. Nonetheless, misinformation is misinformation.)