this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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But efficiency is not the only consideration, privacy and self reliance are important facets as well. Your argument about efficiënt computing is 100% valid but there is a lot more to it.
Oh, absolutely. There are plenty of good reasons to run any application locally, and a generative ML model is just another application. Some will make more sense running from server, some from client. That's not the issue.
My frustration is with the fact that a knee-jerk reaction took all the 100% valid concerns about wasteful power consumption on crypto and copy-pasted them to AI because they had so much fun dunking on cryptobros they didn't have time for nuance. So instead of solving the problem they added incentive for the tech companies owning this stuff to pass the hardware and power cost to the consumer (which they were always going to do) and minimize the perception of "costly water-chugging power-hungry server farms".
It's very dumb. The entire conversation around this has been so dumb from every angle, from the idiot techbros announcing the singularity to the straight-faced arguments that machine learning models are copy-pasting things they find on the Internet to the hyperbolic figures on potential energy and water cost. Every single valid concern or morsel of opportunity has been blown way out of reasonable proportion.
It's a model of how our entire way of interacting with each other and with the world has changed online and I hate it with my entire self.
From what I learned over the years: AI isn't likely to destroy income for entry-level artists. They destroy the quagmires those artists got stuck in. The artists this will replace first and foremost are those creating elevator music, unassuming PowerPoint presentation backgrounds, Stock photos of coffee mugs. All those things where you really don't need anything specific and don't really want to think about anything.
Now look how much is being paid for those artworks by the customers on Shutterstock and the like. Almost nothing. Now imagine what Shutterstock pays their artists. Fuck all is what. Artists might get a shred of credit here and there, a few pennies, and that's that. The market AI is “disrupting” as they say, is a self-exploitative freelancing hellhole. Most of those artists cannot live off their work, and to be frank: Their work isn't worth enough to most people to pay them the money they'd need to live.
Yet, while they chase the carrot dangling in front of them, dreaming of fame and collecting enough notoriety through that work to one day do their real art, instead of interchangeable throwaway-stuff made to fit into any situation at once, Corporations continue to bleed them dry, not allowing any progress for them whatsoever. Or do you know who made the last image of a coffee mug you saw in some advert?
The artists who manage to make a living (digital and analog) are those who manage to cultivate a following. Be that through Patreon, art exhibitions, whatever. Those artists will continue to make a living because people want them to do exactly what they do, not an imitation of it. They will continue to get commissioned because ´people want their specific style and ideas.
So in reality, it doesn't really destroy artists, it replaces one corpo-hellhole (freelancing artist) with another (freelancing AI trainer/prompter/etc)
It's really not that exciting. Quite the opposite. The rush for AI in everything is absolutely bonkers, since those LLMs are just stupid as fuck and not suited for any sort of productive performance they get hyped up to achieve.
I'm annoyed that we're going crazy because computers manage to spew out bullshit that vaguely sounds like the bullshit humans spew out, yet is somehow even less intelligent. At the same time, people think, this empty yapping is more accurate and totally a miracle, while all it really shows is that computers are good at patterns and language and information follow patterns - go figure.
I'm annoyed that Silicon Valley tech evangelists get away with breaking every law they fucking want, once again in the creation of those tools.
Yet, I'm neither worried about the ecological impact nor about the impact on the workforce. Yes, jobs will shift, but that was clear as day since I was a kid. I don't even necessarily think “AI” will be the huge game changer it's made up to be.
When they run out of training data (which is fueled by slave labor, because of fucking course it is) or AIs start ingesting too many AI-generated texts, the models we have today just collapse, disintegrating into a blabbering mess.