You did not take the whole footprint of the training process of a generative model into account, though.
Also, to me as an artist, more important: what about the ripping of artists without them being payed or not even getting credits? This fuels the inequity of this planet even more and I find this quite concerning.
I summed up my thoughts in combination with sources on my german blog.
Can you elaborate how I did allegedly moved the goal post? Also: didn't I basically respond to the footprint point by adding the info that only the usage should not be taken into account, when there is also a huge training process for generative models involved? And with the ethical question of ripping of artists, which works were illegally used for training such models, I basically seconded the initial critic point of this whole comment-thread: "stolen Ai images" - at least I understood the point that the "stolen" is related to the training process.
So, do you acknowledge that generating an image has a very low energy footprint?
To the other point: The claim is just begging the question, because learning is literally not "stealing". You could be calling it "plagiarizing" if the generated images were close reproductions of some original images, but this isn't even the case. The actual complaint against AI art a few years ago was that some artists's styles was imitated in some images, but this isn't even the case in this game. Or can you point to some artist who's style is clearly imitated here?
And most importantly: It's neither illegal nor immoral to vaguely imitate some artist's art style, but in this case this isn't even some existing artist's art style! So what exactly(!) are you even complaining about?
I do neither acknowledge it, nor do I disagree, since: 1. I do not know how much it would drain with different kind of hardware, nor can I understand from your point how much energy was consumed exactly. Also you first compare your image generation with gaming (false comparison - maybe people do not game at all? Maybe they game rather short and not hardware-intense games?) later you compare energy consumption with eating burgers (false comparison ... hardware vs human body?). 2. With this question you avoid answering my questions from before.
Imitating might not be illegal, but at least in Germany there is the copyright law (UrhG §53.7), which says that you can only "record" and copy a work without the agreement of the author for private purposes. 1. The training site: big tech companies did rip of many artists to generate a model from their work for commercial purposes. So this would be already against the German copyright law (especially since according to the U.S. copyright office Google used works, which were even "behind a firewall on subscription-based websites"). 2. Regarding the "AI generating site" it got proven already that not only a style adaption is possible, but also direct copies are possible. 3. Even if it would be legal in all manners, I personally would not find it right that artists get ripped off, while a big company doing so, would get profit from it without compensating these artists. This just already feels completely wrong.
Just in case it comes up now: I do not find it legit here to say "AI training is like human learning and a human can also learn from other peoples works". Sure a human can do so in theory, but at least I can tell that in practice I did not train almost all the known music pieces out there to get where I am know as a music composer. My active training set probably was rather small compared to generative AI models training sets. Yet still I am capable of producing new music based on decisions and experience in different kind of areas of my life. So with this point I basically just want to throw in the question whether "AI training vs human training" really is that direct comparable.
You suddenly point to whether "I can prove it in this game here", while this was not the point. The initial point basically was "try not to use AI, make it yourself, which has more soul, AI is driven on stolen art" (original comment-thread starter).
What I personally complaining about is the general point of view on AI in such regards. I would not even say that you may never use AI techniques (hint: read my blogpost). My personal main concern is the "ripping of artists, who will probably never get rewarded monetary nor with honor/recognition". Also additional concerns in this topic are that facts get turned around, inequity gets fueled, dangers of AI could be talked down (there allegedly already was an AI driven suicide). Sure the last points might not be connected to the image generation site of AI, but you asked what I am complaining about.
I'm not interested in continuing the conversation with you, if you simply dismiss everything in a very unproductive way. The other guy presented an article that was biased against AI, but, for the sake of argument, I still took the joules as the energy cost, applied them to my generation process and provided AAA gaming and the BigMac as a scale comparison to put things into perspective. I did this because people often do not know how much "1188 Joules" actually are.
1188 Joules sound like much, but if you have a 1m^2 solar power, it produces somewhere between 500000 and 750000 Joules in an hour on a sunny day in Germany. This puts things into perspective and helps people understand that image generation isn't "destroying the planet" or (as the other guy said) "ai is literally killing our planet. it takes 10x more power than anything you can conceive of."
You can't even acknowledge that my image generation cost (1188 Joules per pic) is tiny compared to gaming or a single BigMac (20 million Joules) and so you try to dismiss my point by claiming that somehow the energy costs are incomparable and saying "maybe people do not game at all?". We both know that you understand how devastating this point is to the guy's "ai is literally killing our planet" argumentation. You know. I know. So ask yourself why you do this...
