I think the comparison in energy consumption is misleading because phones use unintuively little energy, as much as 10 Google searches per one charging, (Andy Masley has good articles on AI emissions), using a smartphone for one year costs less than a dollar. I think a good heuristic is “if it’s free, it uses so little energy that it’s not worth considering”.
If you’re not paying to generate it, you’re also not taking any income away from artists.
The argument that it’s bad vibes for artists is a good one.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “the average US household consumes about 10,500 kilowatthours (kWh) of electricity per year”
The study cited in the article says that 1,000 AI images uses around 3 kilowatt-hours of electricity. If someone made 10,000 AI images in a year, they would have increased their electricity usage by ~0.3%, which is not nothing, but not significant.
A moderately efficient air-conditioner seems to use one kilowatt hour per hour, so generating 10 AI images is approximately equivalent to using an air-conditioner for 2 minutes.
Also, we’d need to consider the environmental costs of creating Bulby by non-AI means. Even assuming they are lower than AI generation now, I could see the argument flipping into a pro-AI art argument with sufficient technological advancement.
Surely the environmental externalizes are dramatically lower with AI than with humans. There’s a reason people bringing up this argument never do the actual apples-to-apples comparison: because once AI is capable of doing something, it can do it very cheaply.
I think the comparison in energy consumption is misleading because phones use unintuively little energy, as much as 10 Google searches per one charging, (Andy Masley has good articles on AI emissions), using a smartphone for one year costs less than a dollar. I think a good heuristic is “if it’s free, it uses so little energy that it’s not worth considering”.
If you’re not paying to generate it, you’re also not taking any income away from artists.
The argument that it’s bad vibes for artists is a good one.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “the average US household consumes about 10,500 kilowatthours (kWh) of electricity per year”
The study cited in the article says that 1,000 AI images uses around 3 kilowatt-hours of electricity. If someone made 10,000 AI images in a year, they would have increased their electricity usage by ~0.3%, which is not nothing, but not significant.
A moderately efficient air-conditioner seems to use one kilowatt hour per hour, so generating 10 AI images is approximately equivalent to using an air-conditioner for 2 minutes.
Also, we’d need to consider the environmental costs of creating Bulby by non-AI means. Even assuming they are lower than AI generation now, I could see the argument flipping into a pro-AI art argument with sufficient technological advancement.
Surely the environmental externalizes are dramatically lower with AI than with humans. There’s a reason people bringing up this argument never do the actual apples-to-apples comparison: because once AI is capable of doing something, it can do it very cheaply.