What a rotten exchange.
So that makes AI a "dual good", like a kitchen knife: you can cut your tomato or kill you neighbor with it, entirely up to the "user". Not all users are good, so we'll see an intense amplification of both good and bad.
They're adrift, every new "fact" (whether true or false) blows them in a new direction. Often they get led in terrible directions from statements that are entirely true (but missing important context).
A lot of financial cons work that way, a long string of true statements that seem to lead to a particular conclusion. I know that if someone is offering me 20% APY there will usually be some risk or fee that offsets those market-beating gains (it may be a worthwhile risk or a well earned fee, but that number needs to trigger further investigation).
We need people to be equipped with that sort of framework in as many areas as possible, but we seem to be moving backwards in that area.
I put in one of the driest descriptions of the Holocaust I could find and it got a very high score for bias, calling a factual description of a massacre emotional sensationalism because it inevitably contains a lot of loaded words.
It also doesn't differentiate between reporting, commentary, poetry, or anything else. It takes text and spits out a number, which is a very shallow analysis.
AI can probably fool most court judges now. Or the defense can refute legitimate evidence by saying “it’s AI / false”. How would that be refuted?
You might generate an AI video of me committing a crime, But the CCTV on the street didn't show it happening and my phone cell tower logs show I was at home. For the legal system I don't think this is going to be the biggest problem. It's going to be social media that is hit hardest when a fake video can go viral far faster than fact checking can keep up.
Given the obvious personal safety upsell ("our phone/dashcam/... produces court-admissible evidence!"), I think we'll even see this in consumer devices before too long.
For the nth time: scale, easiness, and access, matter. AI puts propaganda abilities far beyond the reach of those men in the hands of many more people. Do you not understand the difference between one man with a revolver and an army with machine guns? They are not the same.
Nowhere in my comment am I “blaming the tools”. I’ll ask you engage with the argument honestly instead of simply parroting what you already believe absent reading.
> I’ll ask you engage with the argument honestly instead of simply parroting what you already believe absent reading
I did engage with argument. The argument is a tiresome old argument that is knee-jerk anti tech. You seem to be the thoughtless one in this discourse repeating for the infinite time an anti-tech position assuming net negatives outweigh massively net +ves.
Also, why attack me instead of the argument? Did I touch a logical sore point? I believe so.
> For the nth time: scale, easiness, and access, matter.
By that logic, So the printing press was evil? Remember, Mao/Stalin/Hitler used presses to spread their propaganda.
Also, for the n+1 time, using your own style, don't be lazy:
1. Come up with a net benefit calculation for AI. What? You can't? Then, don't try to claim this is all net negative.
2. Explain how AI is different from other tech like the printing press, that also had scale, easiness, and access.
A modern laptop is running almost fanless, like a 486 from the days of yore.
A single H200 pumps out 700W continuously in a data center, and you run thousands of them.
Also, don't forget the training and fine tuning runs required for the models.
Mass transportation / global logistics can be very efficient and cheap.
Before the pandemic, it was cheaper to import fresh tomatoes from half-world away rather than growing them locally in some cases. A single container of painting supplies is nothing in the grand scheme of things, esp. when compared with what data centers are consuming and emitting.
so if power were plentiful and environmental you'd be onboard with it?
Please see my other comment about energy consumption and connect the dots with how open loop DLC systems are harmful to fresh water supplies (which is another comment of mine).
> so if power were plentiful and environmental you'd be onboard with it?
This is a pretty loaded way to ask this. Let me put this straight. I'm not against AI. I'm against how this thing is built. Namely:
- Use of copyrighted and copylefted materials to train models and hiding under "fair use" to exploit people.
- Moreover, belittling of people who create things with their blood sweat and tears and poorly imitating their art just for kicks or quick bucks.
- Playing fast and loose with environment and energy consumption without trying to make things efficiently and sustainably to reduce initial costs and time to market.
- Gaslighting the users and general community about how these things are built, and how it's a theater, again to make people use this and offload their thinking, atrophying their skills and making them dependent on these.
So it's pretty nuanced, and the AI iceberg goes well below OpenAI/Anthropic/Mistral trio.
As opposed to the illusory/fake/immoral benefits of using LLMs for entertainment purposes (leaving aside all other applications for now)?
How do you feel about Hollywood, or even your local theater production? I bet the environmental unit economics don't look great on those either, yet I wouldn't be so quick to pass moral judgement.
Many people think that when a piece of hardware is idle, its power consumption becomes irrelevant, and that's true for home appliances and personal computers.
However, the picture is pretty different for datacenter hardware.
Looking now, an idle V100 (I don't have an idle H200 at hand) uses 40 watts, at minimum. That's more than TDP of many, modern consumer laptops and systems. A MacBook Air uses 35W power supply to charge itself, and it charges pretty quickly even if it's under relatively high stress.
I want to clarify some more things. A modern GPU server houses 4-8 high end GPUs. This means 3KW to 5KW of maximum energy consumption per server. A single rack goes well around 75KW-100KW, and you house hundreds of these racks. So, we're talking about megawatts of energy consumption. CERN's main power line on the Swiss side had a capacity around 10MW, to put things in perspective.
Let's assume an H200 uses 60W energy when it's idle. This means ~500W of wasted energy per server for sitting around. If a complete rack is idle, it's 10KW. So you're wasting energy consumption of 3-5 houses just by sitting and doing nothing.
This computation only thinks about the GPU. Server hardware also adds around 40% to these numbers. Go figure. This is wasting a lot for cat pictures.
And, these "small" numbers add up to a lot.
A: GPUs use a lot of power!
B: Not all of them are running 100% continuously, eh?,
A: They waste too much power when they're idle, too!
C: None of the H200s are sitting idle, you knob!
We'll cook ourselves, anyway. Why bother? Enjoy the sauna. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> they are either wasting energy sitting idle or doing barely useful work
Now here's a true (inverse) scotsman, or more accurately, a moved goalpost: Work on things you don't deem valuable is basically the same thing as idling?
> We'll cook ourselves, anyway. Why bother? Enjoy the sauna. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm very concerned about that too, but I don't think we'll avoid the sauna with fatalism or logically unsound appeals to morality about resource consumption.
No, in terms of unit economics, I'm almost certain that the painting supplies have a bigger ecological/resource footprint than an LLM per icon generated, and I'm pretty sure the cost of shipping tomatoes does not decrease that footprint, even if it possibly dwarfs it.
But yes, due to Jevon's paradox, the total resource use might well increase despite all that. I, for example, would have never commissioned a professional icon for my silly little iOS shortcuts on my homescreen, so my silly icon related carbon footprint went from exactly zero to slightly above that.
I'm not really well versed on the environmental cost, more just (neutrally) pointing out that comparing a single 10s image to a 5-6 hour commission ignores the fact that the majority of these images probably would never have existed in the first place without AI.
Here the AI industry is responsible for the environmental damage of AI training. And when you enumerate the damage caused by AI, you include the damage caused by AI training, just as you would include Deep water horizon for the damage caused by oil, and you would include the LA fires as the damage caused by suburban sprawl.
A mid-tier top-500 system (think about #250-#325) consumes about a 0.75MW of energy. AI data centers consume magnitudes more. To cool that behemoth you need to pump tons of water per minute in the inner loop.
Outer loop might be slower, but it's a lot of heated water at the end of the day.
To prevent water wastage, you can go closed loop (for both inner and outer loops), but you can't escape the heat you generate and pump to the atmosphere.
So, the environmental cost is overblown, as in Chernobyl or fallout from a nuclear bomb is overblown.
So, it's not.
As a country, we use 322 billion gallons of water per day. A few million gallons for a datacenter is nothing.
The water gets contaminated and heated, making it unsuitable for organisms to live in, or to be processed and used again.
In short, when you pump back that water to the river, you're both poisoning and cooking the river at the same time, destroying the ecosystem at the same time too.
Talk about multi-threaded destruction.
Pipes rust, you can't stop that. That rust seeps to the water. That's inevitable. Moreover, if moss or other stuff starts to take over your pipes, you may need to inject chemicals to your outer loop to clean them.
Inner loops already use biocides and other chemicals to keep them clean.
Look how nuclear power plants fight with organism contamination in their outer cooling loops where they circulate lake/river water.
Same thing.
The cost to humans living in affected areas was massive and high profile, but it’s very questionable if it was higher than that of an equivalent amount of coal-burning plants. Fortunately not a tradeoff we have to debate anymore, since there are renewables with much fewer downsides and externalities still.
Nuclear bombs (at least those being actually used) by design kill people, so I’m not sure what the externalities even are if the main utility is already to intentionally cause harm.
If you see no difference between them, I can't continue to discuss this with you, sorry.
And I say that as somebody that also finds Ghibli knock-off avatars used by AI bros in incredibly bad taste (or, arguably an even worse crime against taste, a dated 2025 vibe).
I like your discussion style.
I don't want to live in a world in which people get to decide what others can and can't do with their share of resources (after properly accounting for all externalities, including pollution, the potential future value of non-renewable present resources etc. – this is where today's reality often and massively misses that ideal) based on their subjective moral criteria.
Not even just for ethical/moral reasons, but also for practical ones: It’s infinitely harder to get everybody to additionally agree on value of use than on fairness of allocation alone.
After thoroughly mixing these two quite distinct concerns, you'll also have a very hard time convincing me that your concerns for river pollution etc. (which I take very seriously as potentially unaccounted negative externalities, if they exist) are completely free from motivated reasoning about "immoral usage".
For icons in particular, this opens up a completely new way of customizing my home screen and shortcuts.
Not necessary for the survival of society, maybe, but I enjoy this new capability.