Lemmy tends to stigmatize usage if AI because of environmental impact.
I think using AI casually to shorten search for information (always double check it) or to create an image to be amused of or to use as reference to create my own art is perfectly acceptable.
Shit, each day I’m playing videogames, which burns much more electricity than a request to AI which translates to calculation of a function on several matrices. This is nowhere near calculating thousands of textured polygons 144 times a second.
I won’t pay for AI tho if it becomes payed or subscription-only. Fuck it.
Also I’m a programmer and I’ve never used AI to write code for me, and I think it’s terrible idea because it will make me too relaxed and dumb, leeching all the skill from me. Also it is useless for anything relatively complex as it will create more problems (bugs) than it solves, and it will be unable to fix them. Treat this as a side note and not an addition to my unpopular opinion about AI, because this part I think is popular.
I like using AI at work and saves me a lot of time from doing the most tedious tasks. But i agree that the problem is environmental. Which is why I think AI development should be controlled. How? I don’t know but it’s something that experts should discuss.
The environmental impact problem with AI is the land, water, energy use, and pollution caused by the data centers and power plants being built for it, not the electricity cost of sending a prompt to a chatbot. So this isn’t really an unpopular opinion, it’s a misunderstanding of reality.
The usage is only half of the problem. Id argue it doesnt need to be used for references either; just take photos of yourself for poses, gymnasts for weird ones, body inspo if yours doesnt fit, google existing photos for landscapes, make your own references for more abstract ideas… We’ve made incredible art for centuries without stealing the work of thousands and throwing it into a math blender.
The main problem though is the training, which is necessary to improve AI, is very easy to fuck up (and thus waste a bunch of electricity for nothing), and necessitates stealing intellectual property forever.
Not to mention that anything I’ve ever seen anyone use AI for was NEVER a single prompt. Most thinking/reasoning models (read: the useful ones) require dozens of internal prompts, repeat prompts for clarification, etc etc.
Locally hosted LLMs are by far the most ethical way to use AI, but they still involve stealing, still produce insane amounts of waste through training, and still require significantly more electricity than an equivalent few dozen google searches (obviously excluding Google’s forced use of AI)
Tbf I, as a software developer, find inefficient or unoptimized software to be unethical, as it worsens the problem of global warming by wasting electricity.
Take any triple A game, say it could be 20% more optimized with a month in the oven. Say 200,000 people play it for 4+ hours a day, and a patch is made as soon as possible (but the product needed released unoptimized).
We have wasted around 5 million compute-hours, which could be around 400 watts, so ~2 million kwh, or 2 gigawatts of electricity. That amount of electricity equates to about 52,000 gallons of gasoline. Now multiply that by every company that does the same thing, for every release…
(Math: 200,000 people x 4 hours x 20% (.2) = about 5 mill compute hours with rounding for the 4+ hours. 5 mill x 400 watts =~ 2 bill watts, 2 mill kilowatts, 2k megawatts, 2 gigawatt hours. 1 gallon of gasoline is about 33.7 kwh, so about 27,000 gallons for a gigawatt hour, we need two, 52000 gallons.)
Lemmy tends to stigmatize usage if AI because of environmental impact.
I think using AI casually to shorten search for information (always double check it) or to create an image to be amused of or to use as reference to create my own art is perfectly acceptable.
Shit, each day I’m playing videogames, which burns much more electricity than a request to AI which translates to calculation of a function on several matrices. This is nowhere near calculating thousands of textured polygons 144 times a second.
I won’t pay for AI tho if it becomes payed or subscription-only. Fuck it.
Also I’m a programmer and I’ve never used AI to write code for me, and I think it’s terrible idea because it will make me too relaxed and dumb, leeching all the skill from me. Also it is useless for anything relatively complex as it will create more problems (bugs) than it solves, and it will be unable to fix them. Treat this as a side note and not an addition to my unpopular opinion about AI, because this part I think is popular.
I like using AI at work and saves me a lot of time from doing the most tedious tasks. But i agree that the problem is environmental. Which is why I think AI development should be controlled. How? I don’t know but it’s something that experts should discuss.
The environmental impact problem with AI is the land, water, energy use, and pollution caused by the data centers and power plants being built for it, not the electricity cost of sending a prompt to a chatbot. So this isn’t really an unpopular opinion, it’s a misunderstanding of reality.
The usage is only half of the problem. Id argue it doesnt need to be used for references either; just take photos of yourself for poses, gymnasts for weird ones, body inspo if yours doesnt fit, google existing photos for landscapes, make your own references for more abstract ideas… We’ve made incredible art for centuries without stealing the work of thousands and throwing it into a math blender.
The main problem though is the training, which is necessary to improve AI, is very easy to fuck up (and thus waste a bunch of electricity for nothing), and necessitates stealing intellectual property forever.
Not to mention that anything I’ve ever seen anyone use AI for was NEVER a single prompt. Most thinking/reasoning models (read: the useful ones) require dozens of internal prompts, repeat prompts for clarification, etc etc.
Locally hosted LLMs are by far the most ethical way to use AI, but they still involve stealing, still produce insane amounts of waste through training, and still require significantly more electricity than an equivalent few dozen google searches (obviously excluding Google’s forced use of AI)
There are always FTL, Noita, Slay the Spire, Hellcard, (the original) Cave Story, etc.
inb4 games are rated as “ethical” or not based on electricity usage
Tbf I, as a software developer, find inefficient or unoptimized software to be unethical, as it worsens the problem of global warming by wasting electricity.
Take any triple A game, say it could be 20% more optimized with a month in the oven. Say 200,000 people play it for 4+ hours a day, and a patch is made as soon as possible (but the product needed released unoptimized).
We have wasted around 5 million compute-hours, which could be around 400 watts, so ~2 million kwh, or 2 gigawatts of electricity. That amount of electricity equates to about 52,000 gallons of gasoline. Now multiply that by every company that does the same thing, for every release…
(Math: 200,000 people x 4 hours x 20% (.2) = about 5 mill compute hours with rounding for the 4+ hours. 5 mill x 400 watts =~ 2 bill watts, 2 mill kilowatts, 2k megawatts, 2 gigawatt hours. 1 gallon of gasoline is about 33.7 kwh, so about 27,000 gallons for a gigawatt hour, we need two, 52000 gallons.)
I really appreciate comments like these
Are you implying that that’d somehow be bad? Actually, that metric already exists: installation size!
True, but, sadly, I’m omnivorous and I like diversion in my game library.