Reddit is considered one of the most human spaces left on the internet, but mods and users are overwhelmed with slop posts in the most popular subreddits.
I went on reddit yesterday just for a minute. Saw a post about some guy asking what he could do with a small hallway like space in his house (imagine a small walk in closet without the door). Almost every response I opened up was an AI generated image. That thread alone probably wasted a small swimming pool of water just cause some people couldn’t be arsed to copy and paste a server rack.
For all the criticism of AI, this is the one that’s massively overstated.
On my PC, the task energy of a casual diffusion attempt (let’s say a dozen+ images in few batches) on a Flux-tier model is 300W * 240 seconds.
That’s 54 kilojoules.
…That’s less than microwaving leftovers, or a few folks browsing this Lemmy thread on laptops.
And cloud models like Nano Banana are more efficient than that, batching the heck out of generations on wider, more modern hardware, and more modern architectures, than my 3090 from 2020.
Look. There are a million reasons corporate AI is crap.
But its power consumption is a meme perpetuated by tech bros who want to convince the world scaling infinitely is the only way to advance it. That is a lie to get them money. And it is not the way research is headed.
Yes they are building too many data centers, and yes some in awful places, but that’s part of the con. They don’t really need that, and making a few images is not burning someone’s water away.
I went on reddit yesterday just for a minute. Saw a post about some guy asking what he could do with a small hallway like space in his house (imagine a small walk in closet without the door). Almost every response I opened up was an AI generated image. That thread alone probably wasted a small swimming pool of water just cause some people couldn’t be arsed to copy and paste a server rack.
For all the criticism of AI, this is the one that’s massively overstated.
On my PC, the task energy of a casual diffusion attempt (let’s say a dozen+ images in few batches) on a Flux-tier model is 300W * 240 seconds.
That’s 54 kilojoules.
…That’s less than microwaving leftovers, or a few folks browsing this Lemmy thread on laptops.
And cloud models like Nano Banana are more efficient than that, batching the heck out of generations on wider, more modern hardware, and more modern architectures, than my 3090 from 2020.
Look. There are a million reasons corporate AI is crap.
But its power consumption is a meme perpetuated by tech bros who want to convince the world scaling infinitely is the only way to advance it. That is a lie to get them money. And it is not the way research is headed.
Yes they are building too many data centers, and yes some in awful places, but that’s part of the con. They don’t really need that, and making a few images is not burning someone’s water away.