this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
683 points (94.8% liked)
Fuck AI
2417 readers
1263 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This pretty well encapsulates my feelings, except for the issue of training the models. AI is cool tech, but the fact remains that people are making money off of scraped content. Not to mention the environmental aspect.
Honestly I find it difficult to reconcile.
In a perfect world, we would have open source models trained on public domain and properly licensed content.
I don’t think AI is going to replace artists any time soon. On the personal side, people create for the joy of it, whatever that means to them. On the professional side, people have a hard enough time communicating what they want to an actual person, much less a computer.
As someone that likely has moderate aphantasia, I really struggle with describing what I want. Being able to tell an image gen to make so many variations of X, and then commission a friend to take inspiration from Y and Z to make something original is really freeing for both sides, imo.
I’ve never gotten exactly what I’m looking for, but it almost always gives me something to point to, without doing a bunch of test drafts. I suppose that’s technically taking work away from the artist, but so does having an ‘undo’ button in procreate.
Idk, it’s a more complex issue than many make it out to be. I’m still further on the fuck ai side than not, just due to its current implementations.
End rant.
I mean Adobe firefly addresses the properly licensed dataset issue and afaik it's all viewable (though I'd much prefer something anyone could use offline locally). Environmental impact will always be an issue unless we see some evidence of mitigation either from direct green energy use or at least creating additional green energy generation from any organization doing the base model training.
Environmental impact of gen AI pales in comparison to the environmental impact of alternatively making all the generated pieces manually. Let's say Shutterstock switches purely to genAI images trained on their own licensed stock images. Do you think their total carbon output will go up or down now that they've stopped doing photoshoots of people and objects in seemingly random situations?
There's a good amount of research going into reducing the compute needed for training and inference, as well as a ton of R&D going into making far more energy efficient hardware for training and inference
Just like how 3D rendering has gone from dedicated $40,000 workstations and render farms to something that's just done for funsies on your phone, the capabilities of these really powerful models will eventually be squished onto the cheapest, lowest power mass market computers of the day
The biggest long term challenge will be the training data and licensing of outputs. If AI outputs are stuck in a legal state where you simply can't use them commercially, the whole industry will collapse and return to the most ignored corners of university computer science programs. If models aren't required to get licensing for all training data we'll probably just keep seeing companies hoovering up data in the most unethical possible ways to train their big models