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using AI to create these images is really gonna help with the hole in the floor
There's no way I will find it but I could swear I've seen that image before the AI hype.
it must be there for a reason
This is why I can't take "The purpose of a system is what it does" seriously
Why? The purpose of the system is to not work, so there are no democratic checks.
Seems fatalist to me. Take your preferred system of government, introduce on flaw, and critics will say the flaw is intentional rather than proposing ways to fix it. Also, the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
The purpose of a hospital is to cure just enough patients.
And the purpose of Ukraine is to be caught in a stalemate. The West gives them just enough support to never lose, but never enough support to win.
And the purpose of the British government is to pretend like it is responsive to protests.
And the purpose of buses is to burn gasoline and support the oil industry, when trains or trams would be much more efficient.
And the purpose of arguing on the internet is to waste everyone's time while accomplishing nothing
Etc etc
Wow! An easy answer to every problem. I think you might actually have a semantic stop-sign; an answer to everything that suppresses curiosity. Why isn't the hospital curing more patients? "That's not its purpose!"
The purpose of the hospital is to cure patients as cost-effectively as it can. We don't have enough doctors in Canada, not because that is by design, but because we are failing as a country and could do better.
The internet was obviously not created with that intention, but social media may have that purpose.
Anyway, what I love about this phrase, the purpose of a system is what it does, is that it implies there's no point in trying to fix anything. There's no point in even checking if there is anything that can be fixed or improved; there is no point in separating the good stuff from the bad when we burn everything down; the only way to improve anything is revolution. That's different of course from my perspective -- revolution can fix the worst problems but there still exist other problems that can be solved without such a dicy method.
If the purpose of a hospital is to only cure enough patients, the question becomes; "Why is the purpose of a hospital to cure just enough patients?"
You aren't supposed to just use it to argue in a circle. The purpose of a system is what it does, so, why is that the purpose of the system and why do we have that system?
It implies that the system is working as intented, and that's why we need to destroy it to build an entirely different system.
I think you're describing an heuristic for predicting how the hospital behaves as part of a larger dynamic system. For instance, the Canadian government makes the trade-off on where to reduce funding; it can pull tax dollars from hospitals and put it towards something else if it appears that doing so would increase the likelihood of re-election. So I assume you're saying, the hospital saves just enough lives that it doesn't create outrage that we're not funding the hospital enough. (Or, perhaps, that the expected marginal cost:outrage tradeoff is not lower than any other place the government can sink tax dollars.) I think we ought at least agree here.
What I don't get is why you describe this as "the purpose of the hospital." I would say it like this: it's the purpose of the government to identify the pareto frontier of where to put tax dollars (this may benefit some members of society more than others, and you could perhaps even convince me that's its purpose); but it's the purpose of the hospital to provide the best reduction in public outrage per dollar tax money received as possible -- or in other words, to save as many lives as it can.
After the revolution, should we really tear down the hospital because it can't meet our new government's demands? Or is the hospital perfunctory and the system that it's part of to blame? This is what is muddled, IMO, by "the purpose of the system is what it does."
For instance, the Canadian government makes the trade-off on where to reduce funding; it can pull tax dollars from hospitals and put it towards something else if it appears that doing so would increase the likelihood of re-election.
But this isn't how money works.
Canada prints its own currency, it doesn't need to pull dollars from one place to fund something else. The government can actually fund everything and just print more dollars to make up the difference. Austerity isn't necessary.
So, why does it happen?
This heuristic can't explain why anything happens, but that's not what it's for? It's for raising the contradictions and forcing us to ask harder questions of systems, like: if a country prints its own currency why would it ever choose austerity?
There's still more work to do to answer that question and this heuristic is useless for doing so, it's really only a basic first step towards building a critique.
I still think it's extremely useful.
Oh, maybe it was this one.
It's so ironic that this one is made by the Russian artist, and the whole story repeats itself so far with one part of the nation being in the hostage of the other.
We're losing this battle so quickly. It's unreal to me how fucked we are.
First time? If there's one thing I've learned, it's that normies don't give a fuck and just want their simple distractions, regardless of what the greater cost to society is.
Like sweeping the tide with a broom
In what way won't it help? Be specific.
Training large models like an LLM (text generation) or a stable diffusion model (image generation) consumes a lot of energy and using these models isn't cheap either. It's bad for the climate in the same way cryptocurrency is.
+1, it is much worse than even proof-of-work crypto though. I think AI is the bigger enemy, since at least in crypto, there are ways of developing and using it that aren't as bad (or even at all) for the climate.
while proof of stake is better, I still think everything crypto is a big capitalist waste of energy
AI is quite energy intensive
How energy intensive?
Like, compared to random cat videos on youtube n all?And would the addition of renewable energy be able to handle it?
Using it, not all that energy intensive (one llm use is roughly the same as 3 pre-ai-bullshit google searches iirc). Training it, very energy intensive.
Yes it would but we haven't even replaced all our previous needs with renewables so it aint helping.
Using it, not all that energy intensive
According to this article, this is not considered true anymore:
As conversations with experts and AI companies made clear, inference, not training, represents an increasing majority of AI’s energy demands and will continue to do so in the near future. It’s now estimated that 80–90% of computing power for AI is used for inference.
I think there's a reason why OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Facebook hold the energy consumption and water usage numbers so close to their chest.
Oh damn. Very good article btw.
According to numbers floating around online, thiat would mean one llama query is around as expensive as 10 google searches. And it's likely that those costs will increase further.
It still seems like the biggest factor here is the scale of adaptation. Unfortunately the total energy costs of AI might even scale exponentially since the more complex the queries get, the better the responses will likely be. And that will further drive adaptation.
This pace is so clearly unsustainable it's horrifying, and while it was obvious to some degree, it seems it's worse than I thought.
This article is dubious. When it comes to training it uses a lot of sensationalist and unsupported estimates. Notice the following quote:
OpenAI and President Donald Trump announced the Stargate initiative, which aims to spend $500 billion—more than the Apollo space program—to build as many as 10 data centers (each of which could require five gigawatts, more than the total power demand from the state of New Hampshire).
I am DEEPLY sceptical of those figures. Like, what data center uses FIVE BLOODY GIGAWATTS. DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH FIVE GIGAWATTS IS. DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH THAT'D COST.
The use of metaphor is also concerning, comparing it to San Francisco or New Hampshire or household electricity consumption.
America produced 4,000TWH of electricity a year. This report says "22% of household consumption in 2028", which if I commit the faux pass of mixing data it gets me 7% of US power consumption. A lot, but not apocalyptic and merely a projection for future power consumption. It's also less than the 50GW to 10 data centers alone in the line I quoted above.
It’s right in that the core problem is that we don’t know and so I can’t fault it for assuming the worst, but even then there are limits.
As for the usage, the document you linked puts generating an image using stable diffusion at 400W seconds, or as much as my computer consumes at idle for 8 seconds. I'm gonna stop reading this article because I'm tired and this isn't worth it.
I'm not pro-AI. I don't like how it makes it so easy to fill the internet with slop. I don't like how it discourages the people who use it from any and all critical thought. I've used AI twice, to reword by assignment questions in college because no amount of googling made the phrasing make sense. All I want is for the fearmongering about AI power consumption to stop, not just because it's inaccurate, but also because it encourages investment into gas-fired power generation to "prepare for the AI boom".
America produced 4,000TWH of electricity a year. This report says “22% of household consumption in 2028”, which if I commit the faux pass of mixing data it gets me 7% of US power consumption.
7% is a fucking lot though?? That's an immense amount of power going towards slop instead of making our lives better or growing the economy or actually being productive.
It's like we just decided to start burning our limited reserves of natural gas for fun.
Yes, it is a lot. But again not apocalyptic. And it's noteworthy how the article tries to frame it hyperbolically as "22% of US household consumption".
Be specific.
Adjust your goddamn tone, when speaking with humans. You're not prompting a so-called "AI".
Social media, including Lemmy, doesn't warrant that.
who cares
Quite a lot of people, especially here on the Fediverse. You’d be wise to care too - AI is no friend to the working class.
I don't and won't. I didn't make this I stole it from another site like a responsible punk
You're not a punk if you don't care about so-called "AI". You're a bootlicker with attitude.
Butthurt
Smoked ham!
See, I can do non sequiturs as well! /s
yes you are sarcastic in implying you can do anything as well as me.
That's totally how sarcasm works, comrade. /s
*AI in its current form, owned by the very wealthy, right?
I mean, I suppose so. I can imagine a theoretical AI that isn’t trained on stolen work, isn’t insanely energy intensive, isn’t controlled by the ownership class, and doesn’t hallucinate wildly. But that’s so far away from what AI is in our current context, drawing that distinction feels like losing the forest for the trees, at this point in time.
Why do you need to bootleg an already existing comic with AI?
When I was younger, I thought calling piracy theft made it sound like if someone actually made the work appear as it was made by them. Generative AI made that a reality.
I don't care what you think at all, you could have not wrote this. Imagine spending your time doing this lol
Only idiots think it's cringe to care about things
you do realise you're one of the people on the right by saying that?
Stealing an image from another source and not caring about someone else's pet cause does not make me right wing lol jesus fucking christ get some god damn perspective. AI is neutral to shitty and I don't care about what you people think about it.
They didn't call you right-wing, they said you're one of the fingers-in-ears denialists on the right side of the comic you posted.
Also, the danger posed by AI isn't "someone's pet cause". It's a global issue. Stop pretending to be some cool, level headed rationalist when really you're just feeling called out for being wrong.
I meant on the right side of the boat of the comic, not right-wing
I know you didn't create this image but someone did and they're ignorant for complaining about a problem while blatantly being part of said problem.
Literally the person you are responding to
PS: also me and a whole lot of other people; just pointing out of pointless your question/statement was.
Why would I care what you think about anything?
Because you're a human being