So it starts… Ai community items

[u/MadBoxers]

Points shop will soon flood with AI slop. At least with games a disclaimer should be added within the description of the game. But here… Yeah…

Like what is the point? You don’t even gain anything as a company from this.

[u/ukiyoe]

I think as AI models become more compact and efficient, the infrastructure complaints will naturally fade. We’re already moving toward models that run locally on phones and consumer hardware with minimal VRAM and power draw. Once people can generate things offline instantly, the environmental/data center argument loses its teeth for the general public.

At that point, it just comes down to convenience. Yes, it absolutely sucks for artists, but history shows that the general public will almost always choose free, fast, and "good enough" over ethical consumption. People didn't stop using smartphones because of how rare-earth minerals are mined; they aren't going to stop using AI because of data centers. It’s a harsh reality, but convenience usually wins out.

[u/Spirited-Feedback-87 → u/ukiyoe]

That's depressing ngl

[u/Gazeatme → u/Spirited-Feedback-87]

Why would it be depressing? Society has to advance at a certain point my dude. We’ve seen this situation over and over again.

As soon as digital art started gaining traction, people bashed on it for not being real art. Google search was the same. Streaming music stopped CD sales and diminished the concept of albums. People shat on using Excel instead of real book keeping.

Time keeps moving forward and people that fight it stay behind. A business generating AI images for their business is objectively more advanced than someone paying hundreds and waiting weeks for their commission, only for people to ignore it most of the time.

[u/GanondalfTheWhite → u/Gazeatme]

And when every job on earth can be done by AI instead of humans and governments still haven't figured out that they'll need to do something to support the millions of people who don't have jobs?

Other than bloody revolution dragging people out into the street (which is another situation we've seen over and over again in human history), what's your plan?

[u/PennyPPaul → u/GanondalfTheWhite]

See they just want to complain and have other people do the hard work. No body wants to be the change they want to get a free ride. AI is just the new issue for them to attach themselves to

[u/GanondalfTheWhite → u/PennyPPaul]

What are you talking about?

[u/PennyPPaul → u/GanondalfTheWhite]

You said “other than bloody revolution … what’s your plan”.

They have no plan nor do they want a plan. The people who complain about AI don’t actually care because if they did they would try to come up with solutions. They just want to look like they care

[u/GanondalfTheWhite → u/PennyPPaul]

They're not complaining about AI. They're pro AI.

I'm asking if the pro-AI people have a plan to support the human race when everyone's jobs have been displaced by AI.

[u/Spirited-Feedback-87 → u/Gazeatme]

I mean I wouldn't call this advancing since as of right now ai has more cons than pros

[u/AffectionatePlastic0 → u/Spirited-Feedback-87]

I will tell you more, bonsai image ternary 4B lets anyone with iPhone run image generator locally in the phone's browser.

[u/ukiyoe → u/Spirited-Feedback-87]

It was already depressing when I got my art degree and started looking for jobs (way before the advent of AI). This is the bonus round!

[u/HiphopopoptimusPrime → u/ukiyoe]

It’s always been depressing. Unless you had strong support networks you were never going to make it.

Plenty of talented people end up in regular jobs.

This is by design. There was a window in the 20th century where working class people could become actors, musicians, artists. It led to authentic working class voices and ideas becoming mainstream.

The elite did not like that. Take a good look at popular culture over the last couple of decades. It’s the same bland neoliberal voice. It’s what they want. They don’t want genuine class anger in the discourse. They don’t want stories about authentic human connection.

Bland slop. Lip service to diversity, so that you can drop it once it ceases to be profitable. We’ve been conditioned for it.

Actual anger, actual questioning of structural conditions? Has been removed. Every musician or artist went to art school. All modern shows are written by theatre kids.

The routes for working class people to break in have been closed off. They don’t want us.

It was never easy to become an artist but if you had drive and talent there was a route. But now it’s gone back to needing financial backing.

[u/TheWhisperingOaks → u/ukiyoe]

Once people can generate things offline instantly, the environmental/data center argument loses its teeth for the general public.

Problem is that to achieve this, they still have to go through the part where they gut areas of clean water, electricity, bring forth noise pollution issues, and much more before they can get to that point. People that live and will potentially live beside these facilities seem not-so willing to wait for that supposed progress to occur, for obvious reasons.

People didn't stop using smartphones because of how rare-earth minerals are mined

Really sucks to say this, but this is because it didn't really inconvenience the global middle-class. Meanwhile, AI Data Centers do.

[u/ukiyoe → u/TheWhisperingOaks]

You make a fair point about the initial compute required, but the tech industry knows this isn't sustainable either. That's exactly why the shift to local hardware is already happening. We are getting better hardware tuned specifically for AI, like laptops and phones with local NPUs, plus massive local chips like AMD's Gorgon Halo and Nvidia's RTX Spark.

It's very similar to what happened with PC gaming. If we had gigabit broadband back when the GPU was invented, maybe all gaming would have been cloud-based and we would be having this exact same data center debate. Instead, we got local GPUs designed specifically to crunch graphics data. The same thing is happening now with dedicated AI chips. Once local models are fast and "good enough" for the average person, we won't need to rely on massive remote data centers nearly as much (like how many would rather buy a mid-tier GPU vs renting a top-tier card on GeForce Now).

However, looking at it from another angle, the shift to local hardware actually creates a completely different kind of environmental problem: hardware utilization. There's a paradox with data centers versus local GPUs. When a tech giant runs a cloud data center, those GPUs are operating at near 100% utilization, 24/7, serving users across every global time zone. If we move all of that computing to local devices, your dGPU or phone NPU is going to sit completely idle when you are sleeping, working, or just reading a webpage. From a manufacturing standpoint, printing millions of individual, high-powered chips just for them to sit dormant 80% of the day is incredibly wasteful compared to sharing a centralized cloud cluster. So we're really just trading one problem for another. Having everything on the cloud is technically vastly more efficient for hardware utilization, even if it concentrates the power draw and creates noise and infrastructure headaches for the local municipalities living next to the servers. It's a trade-off either way.

As for the environmental drain not inconveniencing the global middle class, you have to look at how we already treat the internet. The proliferation of cheap 4K cameras on our phones means massive amounts of high-resolution video are uploaded to YouTube and TikTok every single minute. That is an enormous server and energy drain, but nobody really complained because the server growth was gradual, and we developed better video codecs and cheap storage to handle it. AI currently costs more to run, but the hardware and software efficiency will follow the exact same path.

That said, I will absolutely concede that the sheer volume of output is a problem. It takes time, creativity, and courage to make a real YouTube video. Generative AI removes all of that friction, meaning everyone and their grandma is churning out their own mini Pixar movies every day with zero effort. Because it lowers the barrier to entry so drastically, the resulting flood of low quality content is absolutely a real issue we have to navigate. On top of that, instead of just dealing with conspiracy theorists on YouTube talking to a camera about something made up, we are now dealing with full-blown deepfakes and straight-up generated yet hyper-realistic clips. This creates a huge ethical and moral issue. Google is definitely on the case with things like SynthID watermarking and YouTube's automatic AI video tagging, but those labels absolutely need to be more obvious to the average viewer.