People forget the left sensationalizes things as much as the right does.
A lot of them show datacenter energy use for AI without comparing them to other other workloads. If you’re worried about datacenter energy use, I sure hope you don’t download any apps or steam any music/video.
Interesting how for all the comments about LLMs destroying the climate, nobody bothers responding to the one comment bringing sources and figures to the discussion.
I do think you’re raising valid concerns regarding resource consumption + climate change. However:
youre just trying to justify it.
Learn to phrase things without disingenuously putting words into the others’ mouths dammit. This is not Reddit, behave like a decent person instead of a redditor. Nothing the other user said can be even remotely interpreted as “the energy cost is justified”, in fact they didn’t even talk about resource consumption.
It sure sounds to me like they were trying to justify it. Funny or not, if it hurts everyone so no, it’s not a justified use. Hurting anyone, let alone everyone, just for the lolz is far from acceptable.
“It doesn’t hurt anyone.” does not automatically lead to “I think the energy consumption and its impact is justified”, unless the user claimed 1) that they’re aware of the impact, and 2) that they’re sharing that comment as a counterpoint to that impact.
(Note I’m not even disagreeing with their core argument. Seriously, I low key want to use image generation for some stuff, but when I think on the energy usage I simply “eh… let’s not.” I think the way you phrased it in another comment is way better.)
That they didn’t talk about the resource consumption is part of the problem. Discussing whether the output of a genai system is ‘art’ or not is a fine philosophical debate, but ignores both the costs of creating the output, and the way the data to do so was sourced and processed.
If human ‘artists’ burned through the same amount of power, water, and other resources just to produce their art there would also be an outcry. If the raw materials that ‘art’ was created from were so blatently copied from others there would also be an outcry. Indeed, when a human is found to be copying another’s work and passing it off as their own, there is an outcry.
That they didn’t talk about the resource consumption is part of the problem.
The reply is not claiming they didn’t talk about it; it claims they’re trying to justify it. This sort of “let me assume words into your mouth” behaviour is really bad in online platforms, it’s one of the reasons why Twitter/Reddit/Facebook are such cesspools — once you open your mouth in them, there’s always some bloody muppet pointing their finger to accuse you, while assuming/lying/bullshitting about your “intentions”, what you’re “trying” to do, your beliefs, even the colours of your pants.
It’s so bad that, even if I know this is off-topic, I think it’s worth ranting about it here. We (Fediverse users in general) should be calling this out, before it roots itself here. Unless we want to walk on eggs to say what we think (even if true, moral, and relevant), out of fear others will assume shit to accuse us. Like in Twitter/Reddit/Facebook. Or we get to repeat what’s “safe” to say here, in a big circlejerk.
And it’s completely unnecessary here; the other user could’ve said instead "There’s no gray area about the resource cost and contribution to climate change being driven by gen AI though,you aren’t mentioning energy costs even if they matter" or similar and it would be perfecto.
[On-topic, genAI]
As I said the resource consumption concern is perfectly valid. I also agree with the second concern you’re raising, authorship. I’ll even raise two other concerns here:
3. Those image generators are flooding the internet with low quality content, and making it harder for people to find the good stuff.
4. They’re lowering the bar for fictitious but believable scenes, that can and are used to promote disinformation.
Whilst I agree with your point about strawman arguments in general, that isn’t really the case here. The OP explicitly said “It’s funny, and it doesn’t hurt anyone” when, in fact, it does. This appears to be their primary justification for using it, whilst ignoring the well known costs of that use. I conceed that a, very charitable, reading of their comment might be that they are simply unaware of the environmental and authorship issues and are only focused on whether their image is “funny” and not directly causing harm. However, those issues are so well known that I, and aparently other commenters, do not feel they can reasonably overlooked in any discussion about whether the use of genai can be justified in general.
The other issues you brought up are very real too and, in many ways, more insidious that the obvious ones discussed before. How we overcome those, now that the genie is out of the bottle, I don’t know.
Whilst I agree with your point about strawman arguments in general, that isn’t really the case here. The OP explicitly said “It’s funny, and it doesn’t hurt anyone” when, in fact, it does.
Thats in no way “putting words in their mouth”, I was pointing out what they were saying. Their point literally coalesced into “i posted a funny picture and it didn’t hurt anyone” which is factually untrue by participating in driving demand for harmful tech.
I wasnt insulting in any way, I was illustrating how their point fell apart. There is real, quantifiable harm.
No, I will not fuck off. Criticise what people say, instead of your assumptions over what they say. And if you’re unable to tell both things apart, then you’re probably better off shutting up.
And if I see muppets like you doing this shit again I’ll call it out again, again, and again. And if I were to do the same, I also expect others to call me out.
I am not arguing that everyone should use gen AI over artists. I am just responding to the previous comment that is complaining about climate effects of AI.
I am just saying that I think the climate impact of generative AI is way less then the impact of artist creating the same thing.
Also, the datacenters are usually built in place where the water usage doesn’t matter (and they usually recycle their water in coolong loops), so the climate impacts are often overblown.
Art is self-expression. And I don’t think we (people in general) should be encouraged to be more productive; instead we should be encouraged to express ourselves more and to lead more fulfilling lives.
AI image generation could have a role on this, but in the current state of the things, it won’t — because it’s controlled by megacorpos obsessed with bigger models, stronger models, models that fry the planet faster. For that, they encourage you to replace self-expression with model output, instead of using the model output for self-expression.
(In another timeline things happened in a different way. Those models were trained to be tiny, fast, and consume only a tiny fraction of the energy they do. They’d be weaker, specialised tools you’d plug into GIMP or Krita or whatever: to replace backgrounds, to remove watermarks, stuff like this. But in that timeline people would rather look at what benefits other people the most, instead of trying to screw the others for their own benefit.)
I agree with you, but humans often create images / videos / texts / musics / … that are not artistic. For example logos, ads, sketches or schemas. Those are purely business things where being more productive is beneficial for everyone.
I hadn’t done any calculation, but I guess hundreds of watts over a few seconds that datacenters need to generate an image is way less energy and water than what an artist consumes during several hours while he draws the same image. Plus the electricity for lights or computer consumes.
Thanks, you are being really helpful…
I at least tried to understand the problem and explain my reasoning. And yes, I do not know much about the topic, but everyone here is complaining how I am wrong without saying why so.
So, to have an idea, let’s do the calculation.
Generating 1000 images takes on average 2.907kWh (Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?, A. S. LUCCIONI et. al., 2024), though with very large varience (standard deviation of 3.31). So generating a single image consumes on average 2.91Wh.
I have to make a few assumptions about the artist. First of all, I will ignore the energy their body would consume, since it is pretty safe to assume, they would need the energy anyway.
Let’s assume it would take the artist one hour to produce the same image (based on nothing, just the ease of calculation; feel free to correct me).
If the artist was drawing using a PC monitor, they would consume tens of watt-hours based on the monitor (Internet article: What is PC Monitor Power Consumption? A Complete Guide, Akash, 2026). Computer with all peripherals would consume even more.
If the artist would choose iPad, using official parameters (Apple Inc.), the iPad should last up to 10 hours with its 28.93Wh battery, so the drawing would consume at least 2.893Wh. This is slightly less then AI, but charging the iPad isn’t 100% efficient. Also they would probably use a stylus for drawing, which also uses some electricity, so I would say the total power needed would be comparable (please don’t force me to calculate these efficiencies).
If the artist would draw on a paper, it would get so much complicated and probably lost in all of the assumptions about materials used, their production complexities, etc. But just for a comparison, a efficient LED light consumes from 4W (Internet article, How Much Electricity Does a LED Light Bulb Use?, 2025), so using a bulb for 44 minutes consumes more energy than generating an image.
So overall under my assumptions, generating a image using AI is at least comparable, probably more efficient then hiring an artist to do the same.
I ignored training the AI, because the more it is used, the less effect it has on the generation, and goes to 0 over time. In the same way I ignored the monitor / iPad / light bulb energy footprint during its production and transfer to the artist, since with more paintings this effect goes to 0 too.
Please do not force me to do any more calculation. I think, this was enough.
That’s a lot of fucking words that all just boil down to “I have no artistic or moral integrity and no respect or regard for the value of art or the human endeavor.”
This shows me how hateful and stubborn you are. I never said (and nobody in this comment chain) that gen-AI is better then artists. Of course I agree with how unfairly AI companies treat artists and that they should be supperted.
The only thing I said was that I think gen-AI uses less power and so should be more environmentally friendly. Then you asked for proof, so I gave you a proof. The proof was based on a lot so assumptions, so it could be wrong, but it is still better then saying “I don’t like AI, so it must be worse in every way”.
It seems insane to me that most people in here refuse to admit that there could be one single perspective in which AI is better, there is one single example where it is useful…
If you have to bend over that far backwards to try to get one tiny element of something to not sound abhorrent then maybe question what the fuck exactly it is that you are defending.
There’s no gray area about the resource cost and contribution to climate change being driven by gen AI though, youre just trying to justify it.
People forget the left sensationalizes things as much as the right does.
A lot of them show datacenter energy use for AI without comparing them to other other workloads. If you’re worried about datacenter energy use, I sure hope you don’t download any apps or steam any music/video.
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for
Interesting how for all the comments about LLMs destroying the climate, nobody bothers responding to the one comment bringing sources and figures to the discussion.
I do think you’re raising valid concerns regarding resource consumption + climate change. However:
Learn to phrase things without disingenuously putting words into the others’ mouths dammit. This is not Reddit, behave like a decent person instead of a redditor. Nothing the other user said can be even remotely interpreted as “the energy cost is justified”, in fact they didn’t even talk about resource consumption.
It sure sounds to me like they were trying to justify it. Funny or not, if it hurts everyone so no, it’s not a justified use. Hurting anyone, let alone everyone, just for the lolz is far from acceptable.
“It doesn’t hurt anyone.” does not automatically lead to “I think the energy consumption and its impact is justified”, unless the user claimed 1) that they’re aware of the impact, and 2) that they’re sharing that comment as a counterpoint to that impact.
(Note I’m not even disagreeing with their core argument. Seriously, I low key want to use image generation for some stuff, but when I think on the energy usage I simply “eh… let’s not.” I think the way you phrased it in another comment is way better.)
That they didn’t talk about the resource consumption is part of the problem. Discussing whether the output of a genai system is ‘art’ or not is a fine philosophical debate, but ignores both the costs of creating the output, and the way the data to do so was sourced and processed.
If human ‘artists’ burned through the same amount of power, water, and other resources just to produce their art there would also be an outcry. If the raw materials that ‘art’ was created from were so blatently copied from others there would also be an outcry. Indeed, when a human is found to be copying another’s work and passing it off as their own, there is an outcry.
[Off-topic, metadiscussion]
The reply is not claiming they didn’t talk about it; it claims they’re trying to justify it. This sort of “let me assume words into your mouth” behaviour is really bad in online platforms, it’s one of the reasons why Twitter/Reddit/Facebook are such cesspools — once you open your mouth in them, there’s always some bloody muppet pointing their finger to accuse you, while assuming/lying/bullshitting about your “intentions”, what you’re “trying” to do, your beliefs, even the colours of your pants.
It’s so bad that, even if I know this is off-topic, I think it’s worth ranting about it here. We (Fediverse users in general) should be calling this out, before it roots itself here. Unless we want to walk on eggs to say what we think (even if true, moral, and relevant), out of fear others will assume shit to accuse us. Like in Twitter/Reddit/Facebook. Or we get to repeat what’s “safe” to say here, in a big circlejerk.
And it’s completely unnecessary here; the other user could’ve said instead "There’s no gray area about the resource cost and contribution to climate change being driven by gen AI though, you aren’t mentioning energy costs even if they matter" or similar and it would be perfecto.
[On-topic, genAI]
As I said the resource consumption concern is perfectly valid. I also agree with the second concern you’re raising, authorship. I’ll even raise two other concerns here:
3. Those image generators are flooding the internet with low quality content, and making it harder for people to find the good stuff.
4. They’re lowering the bar for fictitious but believable scenes, that can and are used to promote disinformation.
Whilst I agree with your point about strawman arguments in general, that isn’t really the case here. The OP explicitly said “It’s funny, and it doesn’t hurt anyone” when, in fact, it does. This appears to be their primary justification for using it, whilst ignoring the well known costs of that use. I conceed that a, very charitable, reading of their comment might be that they are simply unaware of the environmental and authorship issues and are only focused on whether their image is “funny” and not directly causing harm. However, those issues are so well known that I, and aparently other commenters, do not feel they can reasonably overlooked in any discussion about whether the use of genai can be justified in general.
The other issues you brought up are very real too and, in many ways, more insidious that the obvious ones discussed before. How we overcome those, now that the genie is out of the bottle, I don’t know.
I already addressed this here.
Emphasis mine. If someone is handling things by how they “appear to be”, instead of how they “are”, then the person is simply assuming.
I don’t think the rest of your comment is worth my time replying.
Thats in no way “putting words in their mouth”, I was pointing out what they were saying. Their point literally coalesced into “i posted a funny picture and it didn’t hurt anyone” which is factually untrue by participating in driving demand for harmful tech.
I wasnt insulting in any way, I was illustrating how their point fell apart. There is real, quantifiable harm.
Whatever though
Yes, it is. Learn the difference between what people say and your assumptions on what they say.
That is what they were saying, though.
Then quote where they would have said what they think about the energy cost, or what they were trying to do. Oh wait they didn’t.
Seriously. You’re all being assumers. And you are being an assumer and a liar.
So, are you naive or insidious with this? Are you actually eating those bullshit sandwiches or just serving them?
Oh fuck off
No, I will not fuck off. Criticise what people say, instead of your assumptions over what they say. And if you’re unable to tell both things apart, then you’re probably better off shutting up.
And if I see muppets like you doing this shit again I’ll call it out again, again, and again. And if I were to do the same, I also expect others to call me out.
You’ve been doing it this whole fucking thread you holier than thou asshat but whatever
Blocked
I would say gen AI is much more resource friendly than hiring artists to do the same
Thing is though, artists are people.
I am not arguing that everyone should use gen AI over artists. I am just responding to the previous comment that is complaining about climate effects of AI. I am just saying that I think the climate impact of generative AI is way less then the impact of artist creating the same thing. Also, the datacenters are usually built in place where the water usage doesn’t matter (and they usually recycle their water in coolong loops), so the climate impacts are often overblown.
They can do something more productive.
Art is self-expression. And I don’t think we (people in general) should be encouraged to be more productive; instead we should be encouraged to express ourselves more and to lead more fulfilling lives.
AI image generation could have a role on this, but in the current state of the things, it won’t — because it’s controlled by megacorpos obsessed with bigger models, stronger models, models that fry the planet faster. For that, they encourage you to replace self-expression with model output, instead of using the model output for self-expression.
(In another timeline things happened in a different way. Those models were trained to be tiny, fast, and consume only a tiny fraction of the energy they do. They’d be weaker, specialised tools you’d plug into GIMP or Krita or whatever: to replace backgrounds, to remove watermarks, stuff like this. But in that timeline people would rather look at what benefits other people the most, instead of trying to screw the others for their own benefit.)
I agree with you, but humans often create images / videos / texts / musics / … that are not artistic. For example logos, ads, sketches or schemas. Those are purely business things where being more productive is beneficial for everyone.
…I’d argue this sort of marketing is actually harmful to society. But I get what you mean.
Even then, AI generators are poorly suited for this. Here’s an example of that; McDonald’s made some slopvertisement, and people got mad.
Way to be a boring, naïve utilitarian.
What would you base that supposition on?
I hadn’t done any calculation, but I guess hundreds of watts over a few seconds that datacenters need to generate an image is way less energy and water than what an artist consumes during several hours while he draws the same image. Plus the electricity for lights or computer consumes.
Oh, ok, so then you just have absolutely no fucking idea what the fuck you’re talking about.
That tracks.
Thanks, you are being really helpful… I at least tried to understand the problem and explain my reasoning. And yes, I do not know much about the topic, but everyone here is complaining how I am wrong without saying why so.
So, to have an idea, let’s do the calculation. Generating 1000 images takes on average 2.907kWh (Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?, A. S. LUCCIONI et. al., 2024), though with very large varience (standard deviation of 3.31). So generating a single image consumes on average 2.91Wh. I have to make a few assumptions about the artist. First of all, I will ignore the energy their body would consume, since it is pretty safe to assume, they would need the energy anyway. Let’s assume it would take the artist one hour to produce the same image (based on nothing, just the ease of calculation; feel free to correct me). If the artist was drawing using a PC monitor, they would consume tens of watt-hours based on the monitor (Internet article: What is PC Monitor Power Consumption? A Complete Guide, Akash, 2026). Computer with all peripherals would consume even more. If the artist would choose iPad, using official parameters (Apple Inc.), the iPad should last up to 10 hours with its 28.93Wh battery, so the drawing would consume at least 2.893Wh. This is slightly less then AI, but charging the iPad isn’t 100% efficient. Also they would probably use a stylus for drawing, which also uses some electricity, so I would say the total power needed would be comparable (please don’t force me to calculate these efficiencies). If the artist would draw on a paper, it would get so much complicated and probably lost in all of the assumptions about materials used, their production complexities, etc. But just for a comparison, a efficient LED light consumes from 4W (Internet article, How Much Electricity Does a LED Light Bulb Use?, 2025), so using a bulb for 44 minutes consumes more energy than generating an image.
So overall under my assumptions, generating a image using AI is at least comparable, probably more efficient then hiring an artist to do the same.
I ignored training the AI, because the more it is used, the less effect it has on the generation, and goes to 0 over time. In the same way I ignored the monitor / iPad / light bulb energy footprint during its production and transfer to the artist, since with more paintings this effect goes to 0 too.
Please do not force me to do any more calculation. I think, this was enough.
That’s a lot of fucking words that all just boil down to “I have no artistic or moral integrity and no respect or regard for the value of art or the human endeavor.”
Go fuck a robot.
This shows me how hateful and stubborn you are. I never said (and nobody in this comment chain) that gen-AI is better then artists. Of course I agree with how unfairly AI companies treat artists and that they should be supperted. The only thing I said was that I think gen-AI uses less power and so should be more environmentally friendly. Then you asked for proof, so I gave you a proof. The proof was based on a lot so assumptions, so it could be wrong, but it is still better then saying “I don’t like AI, so it must be worse in every way”.
It seems insane to me that most people in here refuse to admit that there could be one single perspective in which AI is better, there is one single example where it is useful…
If you have to bend over that far backwards to try to get one tiny element of something to not sound abhorrent then maybe question what the fuck exactly it is that you are defending.
Again, go fuck a robot.
Removed by mod