6 ms·
[flagged]
by conradludgate 26d ago
[flagged]
- Black616Angel 26d agoReading the comments here is worse.
- Citizen_Lame 26d agoIt's like I am on Reddit or Facebook.
- ryan_n 26d agoWhy? Because you disagree with them? Would you rather it be an echo chamber?
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 26d agoHaving a lot of fun with my son using an image of him and dressing him in all kinds of costumes. How is that depressing to you?
- davidweatherall 26d agoDidn't you hear? you must hire a real artist to do that for you or you're exploiting the industry
- ksd482 26d agoI think @conradludgate was alluding to that we have so much of AI slop these days. But I see your point too. I too like to generate cute and funny images and share it with my friends and family. But this being done at scale can lead to overall degradation of the online experience.
- paimapi 26d agoplus the energy cost - https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-a... >Generating 1,000 images with a powerful AI model, such as Stable Diffusion XL, is responsible for roughly as much carbon dioxide as driving the equivalent of 4.1 miles in an average gasoline-powered car. In contrast, the least carbon-intensive text generation model they examined was responsible for as much CO2 as driving 0.0006 miles in a similar vehicle
- whatisthiseven 26d ago1000 images is worth 4miles? Ours cars are atrocious. We can have the most powerful artificial minds imagine 1000 images from simple prompts, and that takes as much energy as moving a human being 4 miles. And that will get more energy efficient. Gas cars have barely budged. Gas cars are the problem, not AI.
- applfanboysbgon 26d agoThis is an embarrassingly idiotic article. They're comparing against the least intensive text model, ie some million parameter model nobody uses. Stable Diffusion is a 3.5 billion parameter model, while the GPT models a billion people are using for text generation are over 10 trillion parameters. To say nothing of the differences in average context size usage. The actual ratio of SDXL to text generation pollution is probably literally reversed from what the article claims by lying with statistics. (Note, however, that OpenAI's image model is much much larger than SDXL; however, we don't have precise numbers for it. Nonetheless, misinformation is misinformation.)
- XenophileJKO 26d agoThat's the complaint? That if I make pictures for a few years, let's say on average 1 a day.. it will equal a small errand of carbon? If anything now I feel LESS guilty about usage.
- Black616Angel 26d agoBut 3 billion pictures per week is equivalent to 12.4 million miles or 639.6 million miles extra per year.* It's not about you. There are no 3 billion people each creating one picture per week. Its probably more like 10.000 assholes creating 2.5 billion pictures per week to satisfy some stupid online feed and the other users creating a picture per month on average. * if we trust the numbers in the other comment
- XenophileJKO 26d agoI mean that in a big number.. It equals around 0.004% of actual driven miles if my estimates are right. That is with an estimated ~270 billion miles vehicle miles every week (I put commercial in there.. about ~200 billion miles if you only include passenger vehicles.)
- conradludgate 26d agoThe slop is what upsets me the most right now. Some people feel the need to attach an image to almost everything the post - even in chat rooms (including slack at work). These images serve no purpose, but the poster feels it is useful - though it was often reaction gifs in the past I'm seeing a lot more AI content than I ever saw reaction gifs, maybe because of novelty or maybe because it's ultra personalised. Sometimes images help to visualise something or to get a point across, but I see so many people who think it's necessary to reply to a discord message with a cat with human limbs doing a dance, or a photo of "themselves" climbing a mountain with the Rust logo to show them mastering Rust... Ok? Image models are useful and I'm thankful for much better visual reasoning but it really really frustrates me the constant need to burn money for all of this slop.
- simianwords 26d agoIts a simple way to feel superior - to sneer at normal people having fun and using technology.
- handbanana_ 26d agoIf you're not familiar of the pitfalls of this tech, and the fact that there are more ethical tools with which to do those things, I'm not sure what to tell you.
- freedomben 26d agoWhat are some of the more ethical tools? I would like to check them out
- fsloth 26d agoIf you want to discuss a matter, it would be nice to spell out your point of view. How is the person supposed to know your opposing point of view if you don't tell it?
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- gloxkiqcza 26d agoI wouldn't feel comfortable uploading a picture of my child to OpenAI servers (for fun nonetheless), but you do you.
- lopatin 26d agoI'm not following the news. Why should we not upload pictures of family members to OpenAI? Are any other cloud providers safe?
- gloxkiqcza 25d agoI wouldn't/don't really feel comfortable uploading private pictures to any other cloud provider either :). I find OpenAI especially untrustworthy because of their known business practices, unestablished business model and unknown future capabilities and role in society. You cannot take that data back once they have it. The condescending tone was unasked for, apologies to OP for that.
- sensanaty 26d agoI wouldn't be uploading pics of my child to platforms that have historically used CSAM to train their models, but hey you do you
- Banditoz 26d agoYou're building a weak strawman here. The author didn't call you nor your son out specifically.
- HDBaseT 26d agoThis is really depressing to me. I think this is abusive. Your son has no concept of the implications of his body, face and identifying features being used here. He has no ability to opt-out, refuse consent, and avoid his data (biometric features) being swooped up in a data-centers for further training, further data collection & further monetization. Your son didn't agree to the privacy policy of OpenAI. This is an extremely high level of disrespect to a person you created.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 25d agoYou're insane.
- HDBaseT 25d agoWhy would you even have kids if you don't want to give them agency or respect? What would it take for you to realize you are being abusive and invading their privacy? Don't complain when your son puts a gun to his mouth and blows his brains out in front of you.
- recitedropper 26d agoThe sheer waste that accompanies image and video genAI is actually terrifying. I challenge OpenAI to put a "your carbon footprint" field next to each generation. If you have nothing to hide, more information is surely better, right?
- vlyan 26d agowould you like a carbon receipt for your video gaems, netflix, and reddit sessions?
- embedding-shape 26d agoI'd love that. What if anything entertainment was required by law to have some value like that, with a standardized calculation?
- cinntaile 26d agoSure, why not.
- apitman 26d agoI personally would love them
- recitedropper 26d agoSomeone needs to name this fallacy. The existence of existing harmful norms does not, ex ante, justify introducing additional harmful norms. I propose naming it the "GenAI Defender Fallacy". Separately--yes, I would love carbon receipts for everything. Such a system would be fascinating and do real good in this world.
- ndarray 26d agoDo you want to know how many identical questions ChatGPT gets asked every week, recomputing its answer each time because people stopped sharing results? I don't, but I'm sure it far exceeds 3 billion. "How to center a div", "how to install this and that package", "what is this pop culture reference", "who is this famous person",...
- busymom0 26d agoImagine if they used the stackoverflow model of "closed as dupe"
- UltraSane 26d agoOpenAI does cache the most frequent questions like this.
- gpt5 26d agoThere is no way to cache the answer to questions that differ by even one token reliably without introducing potential problems.
- serf 26d agothere absolutely are ways to cache common-routes to fields of commonly requested paths. (hint : it's not all regex and checksums.)
- dimitri-vs 26d agoOk I'll bite, how do you reuse the answer to "what color is the sky?" while also layering in memory, custom system instructions and custom response styles?
- zamadatix 26d agoIt's probably only memory that'd need an answer for some form of caching to be worthwhile (though I'd be curious what that answer is) since memory is on by default and rarely identical between users. The rest are nice to haves, but not everyone customizes settings just because they are there so there will be some large pool of users with the defaults who could hit cache without them.
- bahmboo 26d agoGroan. Your comment is the most depressing thing I've read today. What a sad way to look at the world. People are doing stuff and having fun. Meanwhile a whole sub-cult is sucking from the doom straw and mumbling carbon, water, greed, blah. The sport of Golf consumes far more resources than any AI data center.
- Black616Angel 26d agoOkay, but firstly golf is probably the most useless sport ever and secondly there is more than one AI datacenter. Yes, some people have fun, but most of the "fun" nowadays is just endless mindless consumption.
- bluegatty 26d agoThis an oddly cynical comment, that I think says more about the observer than the observed. People are having fun making images. Like they do all sorts of things on the web. Making an image is as simple as visiting a web-page. That's it.
- emsign 26d ago[flagged]
- bluegatty 26d agoThe weirdly narrow and cynical purview of your example proves my point. It echos sentiments of painters, intellectuals and odd religious moralists and other rabble rousers who spent decades raving against 'tHe eVIL pHoToGRaPH' in late 19th and early 20t century. People can now make more expressive images than they could before, which is generally a good thing. Of course, people could always use new technology for negative purposes - and - people have been using Photoshop for decades already to make 'fake nudes' - this is not a new phenomenon. None of this is even a very big deal. We can make images now much more easily, that's it.
- xp84 26d ago> imagine being someone being blackmailed by photos created by ChatGPT Images If anything, the fact that I know for a fact that I can, in 45 seconds, generate an image of any arbitrary person holding Solo cups at a party arm in arm with Vladimir Putin (to crib an idea from one of the demos) should make everyone less and less susceptible to blackmail in general - in fact, even if the source material is real! There was a time 40 years ago when a photograph's existence was considered proof of a fact - the existence of Photoshop-like tools made that into a weak proof, and the existence of genAI has made "a photograph" into a format that is known to be as malleable as a .txt file. Whether we like that or not, no one will stop bad actors from attempting to abuse this technology, so democratizing its use does help people to understand how they work and make potential victims much less credulous.
- crab_galaxy 26d ago> That's it. Yeah ignoring the massive environmental, social, and moral implications I suppose it’s not a big deal at all.
- andai 26d agoWhy?
- raincole 26d agoInsert "Quit Having Fun" meme here.
- tlogan 26d agoMay I ask why this is “most depressing thing I have read today”. Concerns about misinformation? Compute/energy use? Creative work Replaced by AI?
- Scrapemist 26d agoMust be early. Try the news.
- kranke155 26d agoI know of entire media departments that went from - let’s hire an artist and see what they come up with to - let’s produce hundreds if not thousands of images to explore all possible ideas (and end up with something bland anyway).
- Rover222 26d agoTypical HN luddite mindset at this point. This is an exciting time!
- spike021 26d agoHow many memes/gifs do you think have been created by hand or with generators over the last ~20 years?
- embedding-shape 26d agoNot sure you can compare huge ML clusters of GPUs running models in order to do these images, and the typical "meme generator" which is basically a call to imagemagick passing an image and some text.
- spike021 26d agoMy point was with respect to brainrot being depressing but existing for a long time before AI. Not resource use.
- algoth1 26d agoto be fair you need to create a dozen images to get a decent one. Many times i need to get to almost what i want using paint.net and hope chatgpt removes the aliasing/cleans up the pixel boundaries without messing anything up - i'm not complaining though, still faster and cleaner than photoshop -- when it works
- kwanbix 26d agoIn my home city, I started to see banners all made with AI. From my kids schools to banners for food places.
- maxdo 26d agoI’m doing renovation . I slap a prompt in a tile store over my room and design several types of tiles and paint from one prompt while causally browsing in almost real time . Isn’t that the future ? I generated 200 images alone in this use case . What’s the alternative to that ? Send it tomorrow someone who hate their job moving tiles in the toilet , may money , wait 1 week
- dang 26d agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and particularly not unsubstantive + negative ones, which kill the kind of discussion we're hoping to have here (i.e. curious and thoughtful). If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."
- recitedropper 26d agoWhat? He quotes the opening line of the article, and notes that he reacts negatively to it. Interpreting his sentiment as "curmudgeonly" is a clear exaggeration. And sure--it isn't a high-substance comment, but it isn't irrelevant either. It was, for a while, the top-voted comment on this whole thread. That shows people resonate with the thought, and it obviously sparked quite a lot of discussion. This seriously makes me question your, and our other moderators, motivations. Sad times.
- dang 26d agoThis was not a borderline call! The GP comment is not in keeping with the kind of discussion we're hoping for, especially not at the top of a thread—which unfortunately is where cheap negative comments often end up. The problem isn't primarily with the comment, and in that sense conradludgate did nothing wrong. The problem is the upvotes. If it weren't for those, such comments wouldn't rise to the top and choke out more interesting conversation. But they routinely do, and that's one of the biggest problems we have here.
- recitedropper 25d agoSeems like a great way to crush dissent. But respect to you for replying to me. I wish you only the best in moderating, and I hope that this forum can remain healthy--especially in a time where enormously well-funded actors are flexing their power to set the narrative they want.