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The sheer waste that accompanies image and video genAI is actually terrifying. I challenge OpenAI to put a "your carbon footprint" field next to each generatio
by recitedropper 25d ago
The 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 25d agowould you like a carbon receipt for your video gaems, netflix, and reddit sessions?
- embedding-shape 25d agoI'd love that. What if anything entertainment was required by law to have some value like that, with a standardized calculation?
- cinntaile 25d agoSure, why not.
- apitman 25d agoI personally would love them
- recitedropper 25d 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.
- vlyan 25d agoselective outrage, on the other hand, already has a name.
- visarga 25d agoBut is fairness between carbon uses justified? Or we cut the line at some point.
- LinXitoW 25d agoConsidering that especially leftists have spent literal decades hating on vegans for telling them about their individual footprint, there is no real fallacy here. AI haters have somehow discovered personal responsibility. Awesome. They've never ever applied that to anything else they PERSONALLY do, though. It's only things others do. For any personal choices, suddenly it's all the governments fault or the corporations fault. No personal responsibility to be seen. My 5-ish years of veganism have easily made up for a life time of prompting. Yet, I still would never generate video or images in part because of their impact. How many of you non-vegan AI haters are going to be vegan now?
- shigawire 25d agoI can acknowledge that I should be vegan and still be unable/unwilling to make the sacrifices to do it. People are flawed.
- Zambyte 25d agoBeing flawed isn't the issue. Everyone is flawed. The issue is blaming people for problems like environmental damage, while at the same time needlessly causing more damage yourself. The problem is being hypocritical. Some people are certainly more hypocritical than others.
- magicalist 25d agoI mean, I actively advocate for better fuel efficiency standards but also haven't entirely eliminated red meat from my diet. If I'm discussing fuel efficiency standards and you call me hypocritical, even if I granted that, it doesn't seem like a useful turn of the conversation for anyone unless it's a rhetorical move to change the topic of conversation?
- Zambyte 25d agoAdvocating vs blaming. Blaming people for using inefficient vehicles when you eat red meat (assuming you eat enough red meat to have more of an impact than the fuel) is hypocritical. Advocating for better alternatives to inefficient vehicles while eating red meat is not hypocritical.
- Alifatisk 25d ago> Someone needs to name this fallacy. Whataboutism?
- EmiDub 25d agoWhataboutism isn’t a fallacy and is widely misused online. If someone says “I think x should stop because of y”. It is a valid argumentative response to say “y also occurs with z, so should z also stop?”. It is argumentatively revealing either hypocrisy, or that the original imperative relies on additional, unstated arguments/assumptions/biases.
- pfannkuchen 25d agoI don’t think that’s whataboutism? Maybe I’m confused, but I thought whataboutism was more like “you are saying I am doing X bad thing? What about Y bad thing you’re doing, let’s discuss that instead”. It’s a deflection technique, not a check on logical consistency.
- teravor 25d ago> “you are saying I am doing X bad thing? What about Y bad thing you’re doing, let’s discuss that instead”. no one is generally expecting or even asking for "let’s discuss that instead". what they are doing is trying to point out that your lack of of care about Y implies that you never actually cared about X in the first place but rather you only care about me doing X. often times X is actually bad but human nature is such that no one actually cares about it while wanting to appear to when locked down on it. for this reason arguing about X directly is bad optics. whataboustism is basically an effort to draw attention to the selective enforcement of norms, laws, morality, whatever. hypocrisy is implied.
- david-gpu 25d agoIt can also be used to derail a conversation. I.e. "I find subject X unpleasant, so I am going to imply that you don't care enough about subject Y, which has a passing similarity to it, so that the subject of the conversation turns to Y rather than X. I do not actually care about subject Y, but I won't say that out loud". See also "concern trolling".
- rcoveson 25d agoIt's a combination of argument from analogy and reductio ad absurdum. It's not a fallacy. You're free to dispute the validity of the analogy, or you can dispute the absurdity, which you did, by confirming that you would indeed love carbon receipts for everything.
- kraftman 25d agoWhat's the goal of complaining about it though? What's more likely, you persuade people to stop all of these habits that use electricity that burns carbon, or you convert the electricity supply to renewables?
- csallen 25d ago> The existence of existing harmful norms does not, ex ante, justify introducing additional harmful norms The point isn't to justify anything. It's to put things into perspective, and give people a more informed and holistic point of view, and then to ask them to reconsider their opinions in light of more information. There's nothing bad about that. In fact it's a good thing. Especially in a world where people are so easily misled by others who cherrypick unexceptional statistics and then intentionally present them as exceptional in order to generate outrage, retweets, clicks, whatever.
- ndarray 25d agoeven the whataboutism is slop
- uludag 25d agoIf said game, video, or social media site used 1-2.5 kWh of electricity for every 10s of content then I'd say definitely! Thankfully web browsing is no where near that.
- tredre3 25d agoDo you have a source for 1-2.5kWh for 10s of content? It takes about a minute or two to generate, so you'd be talking about a GPU consuming 30_000W-150_000W, it's just not possible. Even if it was distributed (which I don't think it is), that'd be 30-100 datacenter GPUs running at 100% to generate one clip? There's no way that would make financial sense.
- pigpop 25d agoYou must have your units really messed up because there's no way that's right. A GPU drawing 700W for 10s would be 1.9444 Wh or 0.0019444 kWh and that's if the GPU was only serving your image gen for the whole 10s which is unlikely, most of the time is probably queuing since even a much lower powered GPU in a desktop PC can generate the same image in well under 10s.
- xmprt 25d agoreddit used to shared how much gold purchases went towards their server costs (pretty sure it wasn't 100% accurate but at least good to an order of magnitude). It was approximately $1/hour and they served ~100M monthly active users. So I don't think those metrics would demonstrate how wasteful traditional data centers are like you think it would.
- numlock86 25d agothat would be actually pretty cool and would cause more awareness for a lot of people. but something like this would go in both directions i am afraid, as with everything there surely would be people trying to do carbonmaxxing just for the sake of it, kind of like breaking a highscore. i am sure people like this already exist anyway, though.
- handbanana_ 25d agoAbsolutely, I'd love to see how tiny they are in comparison.
- arrowleaf 25d agothis would be amazing, absolutely. Especially if they were able to see specifically where my power comes from, the embedded carbon in the chipsets used to serve my requests, all the costs associated with the datacenter(s), etc. A weekly breakdown would be excellent.
- lukeify 25d agoAnd when my "Reddit energy consumption" rose because they migrated from old.reddit.com, to their new bloated frontend, that's _my fault_, right?
- gretch 25d agoIt is because you know this and you continually choose to keep using it. It’s be like if your 2001 BMW car was super fuel efficient, and then for whatever reason the 2028 model guzzled gas and you chose to buy it anyway Just because the thing you did once upon a time was efficient, does not mean you have a lifetime pass to engage with it no matter the updated circumstances
- lukeify 24d agoSo your suggestion is all responsibility is shifted to the consumer? Absolutely braindead take.
- LinXitoW 25d agoBad examples. Use meat consumption. It will blow any other kind of "non-essential" resource use out of the water, on ALL fronts. It's really hard to believe that people care about the personal impact of their decisions, when it's only ever other peoples decisions that get talked about.
- woodgala 25d ago[dead]
- masswerk 25d agoWhich is, BTW, a funny way of thinking of living creatures.
- WarmWash 25d agoMeat is particularly ironic because it uses an obscene amount of water. Even worse, a lot of the feed for cattle comes from the imperial valley in CA, which has first dibs on the Colorado River, which is on the verge of collapsing. Obviously they aren't cutting usage. But datacenters using water is what the public needs to fear...
- deleted 25d ago[deleted]
- sho_hn 25d agoYes.
- willchis 25d ago_This comment increased sea levels by 0.000000000003m_
- ModernMech 25d agoA round trip cross country plane ride for one passenger is equivalent to about 500k - 1 million image generations. So all one has to do to offset their lifetime usage of image generators is forego one vacation. And this of course is only for current day carbon usage, that could go down (or up I guess but compute-wise usually things get cheaper over time).
- UltraSane 25d agoIs it fundamentally different to burning wood just to enjoy watching the flames?
- Betelbuddy 25d agoI propose they use my body for compost to power their electricity turbines, in exchange for a advance in tokens while I am alive...I am overweight and that is good, more burning mass. We could settle at 2 million USD.
- villish 25d agoIf they could harness the energy from all your atoms it would be worth significantly more than 2 million.
- spider-mario 25d agoAbout the same amount of energy per image as a second of hot shower.
- taurath 25d agoThe waste overall for data centers is beyond terrifying. Enough water for 1.2 billion people. It’s like all the GenX and Boomers looked at the challenges younger people will face and decided make it as bad as possible start kicking them in the ribs for good measure. Theres going to be a reckoning.
- nichohel 25d agoYou understand that any water used is not destroyed, right?
- taurath 22d agoIt is actually consumed water.
- pizzafeelsright 25d agoWhere does the concern for all that water go? Most are closed systems. Water gets recycled. Water gets used like bathtubs and water bottles, right? You cannot believe water is destroyed.
- taurath 22d agoClosed loop systems consume like 40% more power, and aren’t recycled - they’re filled with refrigerant. We’re talking in the southwest where the river is running dry, most power plants are natural gas plants and they use water for cooling (not closed loop, evaporative). So you’ve turned on several cities worth of power plants, with the water consumption to boot, not even to fucking mention carbon costs, for your closed loop system, that you can’t just drain you have to treat it and it still evaps and needs more. From the same companies and people that brought you climate pledges, and being environmentally responsible.
- BoredomIsFun 25d agoYou can generate images on 5060ti, it'd take less than minute per image. Trivial environmental footprint.
- purpleflame1257 25d agoEvery SDXL image uses something like 0.5 Watt-hour. That means that 2000 sdxl images uses about 30 cents of electricity. If we multiply that by 30x for video (a fair assumption for models like minimax H3, which take that much longer to make video), that means you get almost 700 5-second videos for a dollar of electricity, which is about a kilo of carbon dioxide. More or less depending on where your electricity comes from.
- raincole 25d agoNo way gpt-image-2 is as cheap as SDXL. (I dont concern about gpt-image-2's consumption either, just pointing out it's not a good comparison)
- recitedropper 25d agoPeople always napkin math something low, and then every academic who formally studies it ends up with a much higher estimate. I await OpenAI's carbon footprint field.
- Sohcahtoa82 25d ago> If we multiply that by 30x for video (a fair assumption for models like minimax H3, which take that much longer to make video) It takes about 7 minutes for my RTX 5090 to generate a 15 second video with MiniMax H3. At 600 watts, that's 252,000 watt-seconds, or 0.07 kilowatt-hours. My electricity is 18 cents/kWh, so $0.0126. Just a little over a penny.
- eboy 25d ago[dead]