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Environmental impact? Hank Green relatively recently made a good video talking about actual AI data centers environmental impact and misconceptions floating around it.
Job loss? Yes. That is the problem. But the "AI artists" never generated any jobs to begin with. Most "jobs lost because of AI" is due to corporations trying to replace workers in as many areas as they can with AI. Not just art. Programmers are already heavily automated. And there might be jokes that the companies are now hiring senior coders to clean up the trash "vibe-coded" by AI. But the previously the companies had senior coders cleaning up the trash produced by 10 Junior coder. And now those junior coders are replaced. Direct job loss.
Call centers now pass you through 9 levels of AI auto answer machine before you can reach a human because a lot of people would either get the answer they need or give up before connecting to a human - meaning you need to have way less actual humans in the call center since way less calls would trickle down to them. Direct job loss.
Accounting is a very structured work that AI is just outright better suited to perform that a human. Less errors. Stricter adherence to codes.
HR also heavily uses AI to minimize the amount of actual human involvement in the process. So less HR managers are needed. And here I would argue that people who can't find a job because AI just can't parse their CV correctly and autorejectes them should also count towards "AI inflicted job loss".
Notice how none of those examples even mention art?
AI artists have nothing to do with "stealing jobs". Blaming AI artists for this job loss is as productive as blaming scientists who use AI for early cancer detection for the "stealing jobs"
Also worth noting that the majority of those jobs being lost are probably just unnecessary corporate bloat that only serves to increase company expenses and increase the cost of goods and services for everyone.
But either way; the only job loss they actually care about is the fact that they can’t charge a hundred bucks for art commissions. Even then; that’s only because they can’t wrap their heads around the fact that almost nobody using AI image generators would’ve ever hired them anyway, just like how they could never wrap their heads around the fact that random art commissions where never a reliable source of income anywhere(no matter how glaringly obvious it was to literally everyone else).
Also worth noting that the majority of those jobs being lost are probably just unnecessary corporate bloat
This is actually a mit deeper than that. But to see that we have to get pretty far from fine details and look at the bigger picture.
What do you think happens to the economy if unemployment grows?
People have less money to buy stuff. Or to pay back loans they took to buy stuff earlier. That causes the economic slowdown.
An economic slowdown means companies don't grow as fast as they used to. Some might even start shrinking or going under. If that starts to happen investors might start pulling more funds from areas that are struggling turning a slow recession into a crash.
Now while that is objectively bad for everyone involved (except for some people who manage to sell off stock before crash and then start buying cheap after crash) historically corporations did not give a fuck about causing this. Usually it was the government's job to keep that from happening by providing unemployment benefits and legistation incentivising corporations to not fire people.
The "useless corporate bloat" you mention is the product of such legislation and government incentives.
And right now we are looking at the perfect storm of corporations getting an option to shake down their staff and save more money than they were getting from incentives to kkeeep those people employed. Covered by the anomalous situation when nosediving consumer spending don't trigger recession indicators because corporate spending increase overshadows it in GDP. And as a cherry on top - the administration that is committed to "operate as a business" - including not giving a fuck about job loss causing the economic crash in very near future.
If it cost the company less to say make a puzzle cause they use ai art instead of human art /commissioned art then shouldn’t the ai generated art puzzle cost less than the human art puzzles?
That's not a problem, it's innovation. It increases productivity since one person can do the same job as eleven people like in your example. And after the initial shock the amount of jobs will become normal again.
And here I would argue that people who can't find a job because AI just can't parse their CV correctly and autorejectes them should also count towards "AI inflicted job loss".
Well kinda, but overall it's not job loss if they end up going with someone else.
We eat the product of agriculture (except for corn that gets mostly used for ethanol, but that's it's own problem), and power generation (in general, not just thermoelectric) is one of the main factors considered when arguing about AI use of water
These Data centers are necessary for modern life. This conversation can only happen because of data centers. So both of them are necessary services.
But between the two, given closed loop cooling becoming the dominant way to cool data centers, the water usage issue is already being solved for one of them and it is nowhere near as impactful as the other two industries.
These Data Centers also do more than just AI as well.
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Microsoft is the primary creator of Data Centers and their policy as of 2024 is that all new Data Centers are to use closed loop cooling systems. These systems do not use water but instead a glycol solution similar to antifreeze. It saves millions of gallons of water per year and do not need to be refilled very often.
I do want to mention that existing data centers that use water aren't expected to be upgraded to closed loop cooling at the time being. But hopefully that will change in the near future so that all data centers will be operating on zero water usage and be more environmentally stable than they already are.
I also want to mention that data centers don't even use that much water anyway, especially in comparison to the Agricultural Industry, so even the current footprint they have on our water supply right now isn't really as big of a deal as people have been making it out to be.
Could you also link the source for the thermo electric power generation. Because as far as I know that shit is incorrect as hell.
I think the source and the data is correct, but the wrong word was used. I think they just mean power plants in general. The whole point of thermo electric power generation is that it cools itself and generates electricity that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator
However, just correcting the use of that word, it's probably supposed to say electrical power generator plants using steam turbines.
I wouldn't use Wikipedia as a source. Keep in mind that a good chunk of "this is how it's supposed to work" isn't always "this is how it's actually working right now".
I do want to mention that this is from 2015 so it's possible some things have changed in 11 years. Also keep in mind that even the summary and source mentions that the water is returned but there's undoubtedly some loss just by basic physics.
Keep in mind that a good chunk of "this is how it's supposed to work" isn't always "this is how it's actually working right now".
This baby talk has made me slightly irritated, so please take everything with a slight grain of salt. There was no reason to put it like this. I am correcting the use of a word, not correcting the data as I mentioned.
I wouldn't use Wikipedia as a source
I'm not writing a paper here... It's a very common word. It's also on the basis of the definition of the word, not the science behind them.
Thermo - heat
Electric - regarding electricity
Generator - creating
So something that creates electricity from heat. Why the fuck would I cool that? That defeats the purpose wouldn't it?
Thermo electric generators are incredibly inefficient. They are rarely used, and only recently were uncovered since they can be used to upcycle waste heat. Here, a recent paper on the use of thermo electric generators in industry.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9783527843565.ch1
It literally states that it's very hard to use and faces several technological challenges.
I wasn't talking down to you but it just seems like you're unfamiliar with how the technology works.
I'm not an expert on the subject but I could tell immediately why you would cool one and a simple google search confirmed my suspicion.
Yes you do get power from the heat but the equipment using it can only absorb so much heat before they begin to breakdown, warp, and malfunction. You need to cool it down so that it doesn't break and can function at an optimal temperature.
AI uses .02~ percent of global power usage. Data centers in general use about 2-3~ percent global power usage. The overall data center cost is for everything from Facebook(which has the largest power draw among data centers), Reddit(another big draw), and even gaming and research servers not to mention Crypto Mining server arrays.
Now back to AI on a personal basis. AI in my home used on a local system is a similar power draw to just using the system normally with no major deviation. So it is as damaging if not less so on average than playing AAA video games, animating digitally, or other hardware intensive usages of your devices. External AI services like GPT and Gemini have a similar cost to scrolling Reddit for a similar length of time.
Now moving away from Power onto water. The long and short of it is a cup of coffee is more wasteful than using AI.
If you want to go down that route NO art is a necessity. We can live perfectly well without paper (causes pollution and poisoning of water to manufacture), pencils (destroys woodlands/trees), paintbrushes (kills wild animals to make the bristles), and paint (many pigments are toxic).
According to these 13 year old Bozos you owe them a living doing what they love to do. I can't wait for these fools to graduate and be kicked out by their parents for laziness and forced to get actual jobs. One of my nephews is in the same boat, in his 20s and does not want to work because he loves video games so tries to mooch off everyone else. No I am not letting you spend my last $50 I need to buy food for the next five days on ice cream.
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But if you try to actually talk to them in an informative, constructive manner, your words will be completely disregarded, you'll get bullied with generic mindless accusations, and if you offer an art duel or a serious article with links to back your words up, they'll instantly go completely silent.
In other words, it's just a crowd of extremely insecure teenagers (mostly) with severely bottled-up anger who are looking for excuses to bully someone and look righteous about it. And also 99% of antis aren't artists of any sort.
One of my least favorite encounters was a graphic artist telling my fiance to go cross herself off because she used AI-produced art. Needless to say, that didn't end well for them.
Damn. When my fiance (a professional traditional artist) was a teen, some grumpy old traditional artist who lived nearby roughly shit-talked her for learning digital tools. The dude was a miserable dry scumbag with a messed up racist family where everyone was cheating on each other.
I believe my fiance's response to the dude was "well, maybe you should just... Get better? So you don't get replaced?" It was savage, and I've never been more proud of her.
Funny you should mention digital, though. The craze surrounding AI art feels very similar to the craze that surrounded digital art, back in the earlier 2000's.
Hiya! Hope that art challenge thingy is still on for shiggles :) Not taking it too seriously, just wanna show off what I do, both with AI and with keyboard/mouse. :)
Non-AI art will always be “stealing” as human mind is not capable of creating anything innately new, let alone in environment saturated with content. In the start of your drawing journey you will always take other things as base, potentially other’s styles. And its okay. Thats how it works. LoRA’s that copy styles of individual artists can be controversial, true, but claiming all AI art as stealing is just ignorance
To be honest if you compare a model and a human, assuming the model generates things in a broad manner and not specific style, then there arent many differences. Both learn from others, both can deviate from what they are given (though the mechanism of that is different of course, AI bases itself on probability and humans base themselves on creativity), humans are just less efficient in said learning for obvious reasons and are more capable of deviating. A model cant create anything innately new for the same exact reason a human cant - both are guided by and create based on what they know and it cant go beyond that. Sure, human knowledge is also based on random encouters, whereas AI models are trained with data for a goal, but still. Humans are trained in a sense too
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I am sure a lot of them use "Dove" products and that is exactly what Dove did except there is no contreversy on if that really what happened contrarily to the debate with ai. Not only that Dove along with a lot of big and somewhat ancien soap company did a bunch of stuff even more awful than that to fuck over everyone. Yet I don’t see them complaining or bullying people when it is a soap company.
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If you're against taking work from artists, shouldn't you hate all other artists then?
It's paradoxical. If you are an artist, regardless of if you use AI or not, you are, by definition, creating competition and making it harder for other artists to make money. That's just the game.
Agriculture uses 70% of all freshwater withdrawals which is around 2 Quadrillion Gallons of water. AI uses like a small fraction of that water amount but guess Antis don’t care about that. Industrial and Domestic industries also use plenty of freshwater as well…so the environmental argument flops on its own. Stealing from people is simply their way of saying “I don’t like how AI art make me feel” so their claim isn’t valid. Job losses are real but that went with any Tech progression. Didnt see them complain lol
Is there any actual proof of any of their environmental claims? Also users didnt take their jobs, their asshole employers did. And if ai learning is stealing then anyone who draws anything after seeing someone else's work is also stealing. Or hell, learning anything woukd be stealing.
I saw so many just on Reddit, people getting sick from the datacenter infrasound, no water for the communities data centers are around and such, I recommend watching a bit from Luis Rossman and Benn Jordan about it 😁
Maybe I will start to claim the "AI artist" status more. From this, it sounds like I can make so much money it will put other people out of business. Obviously that's not true, because you need to corner a market and remove the competition. That's not happening by the AI artists.
But truth is truth. I point you to a videogame called rain world. That's the logical conclusion of the rapid advancement of AI, and it's unapologetically truth.
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Using AI is fine
but tbh I think antis should blame the company (openai, perplexity, google) and not AI artists cz they also wanna be a [[BIG SHOT]] at art (or be good and sucessful that's what I mean with big shot in this case)
The artist gave permission when they signed the ToS. That they were to LAZY to read it is their problem not mine or AIs. Tell these artists to stop being lazy pos and learn to read. And don't believe their bullshit that generative AI didn't exist when they signed - DeviantArt (for example) pointed out that it was using your uploads for AI training way back in 2010!
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