Training the models is very resource intensive, but after that it’s basically fine. I can run Midjourney image generation on my modest gaming laptop. Takes maybe 30 seconds for a high-resolution image at a laptop’s “gaming mode” power consumption.
AI image generation is comparable in electric use to e.g. playing Valheim or Elden Ring.
It’s when it’s scaled up industrially that it becomes a huge waste of electricity. Me playing Valhelm for 5 minutes is nothing. My startup creating 20000 bots playing Valheim 24/7 is a problem for society.
i mean yeah, statistically, an already mined diamond is a child already dead. you would just stop new diamond mining, or move away from child consumptory diamond mining, you aren’t going to completely demolish every child diamond in existence though, there’s no point, harms already done. Might as well leave them in the market.
this is actually a really debatable argument. If you’re buying it first hand, from somebody trying to make money, yes it could arguably be unethical, but if you’re buying it second hand, i.e. someone who just doesn’t want it anymore, you could make the argument that it’s an ethically net positive transaction. Since they no longer want the diamond, and wish to have money instead, and you wish to have the diamond, and less money. Everybody wins in 2nd hand deals, weirdly enough.
Setting aside “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”, which is a debatable for another time:
I don’t totally agree with your assessment of 2nd hand sales: it’s not ethical positive, at best it’s ethically neutral, because demand trickles up the market. I could go into this more, but ultimately it it’s irrelevant:
The 2nd hand LLM market doesn’t work like that because LLMs are sold as a service. The LLM producers take a cut from all LLM resellers.
You could make a case that self hosting a free open source LLM like OLlama is ok, but that’s not how most LLMs are distributed.
In this analogy, using the diamond does use it up. In the sense that none else can use that diamond concurrently. If someone else wants a diamond, more children must die.
This is different from the trained AI model, which can concurrently be used by everyone at the same time, at very little extra cost.
Even if the diamond mine owners stop mining, it’s unethical to buy their stockpile of blood diamonds.
Also, there is a cost besides electricity - the theft of artist’s work is inherent to the use of the model, not just in the training. The artist is not being compensated whenever an AI generates art in their style, and they may in fact lose their job or have their compensation reduced due to artificial supply.
Finally, this is an analogy, it’s not perfect. Picking apart incidental parts of the analogy doesn’t really prove anything. Use an analogy to explain a problem, but don’t pick apart an analogy as though you’re picking apart the problem.
and they may in fact lose their job or have their compensation reduced due to artificial supply.
highly doubt. Any artists that do lose their job are probably mostly ok with it anyway, since it’s most likely going to be graphical drivel anyway. In fields like media theres a different argument to be made, but even then it’s iffy sometimes. Also i don’t think this would be considered artificial supply, it would be artificially insisted demand instead no? Or perhaps an inelastic demand side expectation.
Although, it would be nice to have some actual concrete data on artists and job prospects in relation to AI. Unfortunately it’s probably too early to tell right now, since we’re just out of the Luddite reactionary phase, who knows.
Any artists that do lose their job are probably mostly ok with it anyway, since it’s most likely going to be graphical drivel anyway.
Replace “artist” and “graphical”, and you just described most jobs. I don’t think most people are ok losing their jobs even if those jobs aren’t especially inherently rewarding; they’re getting paid for their area of training. They’re not just gonna be able to find a new job because in this hypothetical, the demand for it (a living human doing the work) is gone.
I consider this an increase in supply because it’s an increase in the potential supply. Productivity increases (which is what this is) mean you can make more, which drives down the price, which means that artists get paid less (or just get replaced).
Remember: if you 10x the productivity of an employee, that typically doesn’t mean you produce 10x the product, it typically means you need 1/10th the employees. That payroll saving goes right into the pockets of execs.
Also wrt luddites, they weren’t wrong. It did absolutely demolish their industry and devastate the workers. It’s just that the textile industry was only a small part of the economy, and there were other industries who could absorb the displaced workers after they got retrained.
LLMs threaten almost every industry, so there is a greater worker impact and fewer places for displaced workers to go. Also now workers are responsible for bearing the costs of their own retraining, unlike back in the day of the luddites.
A very large amount of those dug up diamonds end up as “industrial diamonds.” Because they are far from gemstone quality. And they definitely get used up. I have used up my share of them as cutting tools when I was a toolmaker.
I know the analogy isn’t a perfect fit for LLMs in general. Analogies never come close to describing the entire thing they’re analogs of, they don’t need to.
It doesn’t matter because this is a suitable analogy for the argument. This is how analogies work.
The argument is that because the harm has already been done, it’s fine to use LLMs.
That same argument can be made for blood diamonds, and it’s untrue for exactly the same reason:
Because buying the use of LLMs (which is mostly how they’re used, even if you pay in data instead of money) is funding the continued harmful actions of the producer.
I can’t believe I have to explain how analogies are used to a grown ass adult.
I mean yeah: if we went and killed every person who benefits from conflict diamonds and closed all blood diamond mines why wouldn’t you be cool with using the resources? Their evil origin has little to do with their practical utility and if the original sin is expiated there’s no reason not to?
Like yeah conflict diamonds have basically no purpose because we can make diamonds cheaper and better in labs but in a situation where there are more practical uses (cobalt, LLMs) once we cleanse the land of the sinners why wouldn’t we use their ill gotten gains for good?
But we’re not “killing” every person who benefits, literally or figuratively. We’re continuing to buy their diamonds (pay them in money and data) while they continue to mine (train new models, use copyrighted material).
It’s not a perfect analogy, models ape the work of artists and take their jobs; it’s like if the diamond was bloody, and as long as it existed, the miner’s family not only didn’t get compensated for the loss but we’re also prevented from getting jobs themselves.
We’re not righting the wrong, were making the wrongs even worse. At some point you have to just burn the whole thing down.
Okay, so again, no new machine learning ever, unless you can prove it’s done without environmental impact or affecting peoples’ right to a dignified existence. That’s the wrong righted. That’s what you’re advocating. Am I misunderstanding?
The people who were exploited should be the ones to benefit from those diamonds.
i mean probably, but this would be a question of what the law says. If we’re talking philosophy that’s irrelevant here, but to include it anyway, it would be something like “the most ethical source of any given item should be most preferred over any other source of said item” or if we’re operating under an ideology of anti-human exploitation idk where we would even start. You need a really concrete definition of exploitation, and how to combat it effectively, without just exploiting more people.
Sounds like you think we should use the diamonds. I wouldn’t be cool with using those diamonds because they belong to the people who were forced to mine them, not me.
I wouldn’t be cool with using those diamonds because they belong to the people who were forced to mine them
well most of them are dead aren’t they? Are we going to put them back into their coffins? Or, how are we planning on redistributing these?
Dead people can’t own things, so that seems like an illogical conclusion, perhaps their estate or family? They didn’t do the work, but they would arguably be most entitled to it.
Is Midjourney available for use locally now? Or have you misunderstood Midjourney taking 30 seconds to generate from their server as happening locally?
That sounds a bit too much. Generating an sdxl image and then scaling it up is the common procedure, but that should not take 2 minutes on a 40xx card. For reference I can generate 3 batches of 5 images (without the upscaling step) in less than 2 minutes on my 4070ti. And that’s without using faster sdxl models like lightning or turbo or whatever.
Training the models is very resource intensive, but after that it’s basically fine. I can run Midjourney image generation on my modest gaming laptop. Takes maybe 30 seconds for a high-resolution image at a laptop’s “gaming mode” power consumption.
AI image generation is comparable in electric use to e.g. playing Valheim or Elden Ring.
It’s when it’s scaled up industrially that it becomes a huge waste of electricity. Me playing Valhelm for 5 minutes is nothing. My startup creating 20000 bots playing Valheim 24/7 is a problem for society.
Yeah. My phone can generate a 512x512 image with Stable Diffusion in like 20 seconds with the right settings.
It’s the mining of diamonds that kills all the children. After the diamond is mined, I can use it with almost no child deaths. Diamonds are fine.
i mean yeah, statistically, an already mined diamond is a child already dead. you would just stop new diamond mining, or move away from child consumptory diamond mining, you aren’t going to completely demolish every child diamond in existence though, there’s no point, harms already done. Might as well leave them in the market.
But buying them funds the diamond miners to mine more. That’s the point.
By participating in the market, you’re perpetuating blood diamonds.
No, using an already-trained model doesn’t “use up” the model in exactly the same way that pirating a movie doesn’t steal anything from Hollywood.
Use a diamond doesn’t “use up” that diamond.
And yet, it’s still unethical to buy already mined blood diamonds from people who continue to mine more blood diamonds. Funny thing about that, huh
this is actually a really debatable argument. If you’re buying it first hand, from somebody trying to make money, yes it could arguably be unethical, but if you’re buying it second hand, i.e. someone who just doesn’t want it anymore, you could make the argument that it’s an ethically net positive transaction. Since they no longer want the diamond, and wish to have money instead, and you wish to have the diamond, and less money. Everybody wins in 2nd hand deals, weirdly enough.
Setting aside “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”, which is a debatable for another time:
I don’t totally agree with your assessment of 2nd hand sales: it’s not ethical positive, at best it’s ethically neutral, because demand trickles up the market. I could go into this more, but ultimately it it’s irrelevant:
The 2nd hand LLM market doesn’t work like that because LLMs are sold as a service. The LLM producers take a cut from all LLM resellers.
You could make a case that self hosting a free open source LLM like OLlama is ok, but that’s not how most LLMs are distributed.
In this analogy, using the diamond does use it up. In the sense that none else can use that diamond concurrently. If someone else wants a diamond, more children must die.
This is different from the trained AI model, which can concurrently be used by everyone at the same time, at very little extra cost.
Even if the diamond mine owners stop mining, it’s unethical to buy their stockpile of blood diamonds.
Also, there is a cost besides electricity - the theft of artist’s work is inherent to the use of the model, not just in the training. The artist is not being compensated whenever an AI generates art in their style, and they may in fact lose their job or have their compensation reduced due to artificial supply.
Finally, this is an analogy, it’s not perfect. Picking apart incidental parts of the analogy doesn’t really prove anything. Use an analogy to explain a problem, but don’t pick apart an analogy as though you’re picking apart the problem.
highly doubt. Any artists that do lose their job are probably mostly ok with it anyway, since it’s most likely going to be graphical drivel anyway. In fields like media theres a different argument to be made, but even then it’s iffy sometimes. Also i don’t think this would be considered artificial supply, it would be artificially insisted demand instead no? Or perhaps an inelastic demand side expectation.
Although, it would be nice to have some actual concrete data on artists and job prospects in relation to AI. Unfortunately it’s probably too early to tell right now, since we’re just out of the Luddite reactionary phase, who knows.
Replace “artist” and “graphical”, and you just described most jobs. I don’t think most people are ok losing their jobs even if those jobs aren’t especially inherently rewarding; they’re getting paid for their area of training. They’re not just gonna be able to find a new job because in this hypothetical, the demand for it (a living human doing the work) is gone.
I consider this an increase in supply because it’s an increase in the potential supply. Productivity increases (which is what this is) mean you can make more, which drives down the price, which means that artists get paid less (or just get replaced).
Remember: if you 10x the productivity of an employee, that typically doesn’t mean you produce 10x the product, it typically means you need 1/10th the employees. That payroll saving goes right into the pockets of execs.
Also wrt luddites, they weren’t wrong. It did absolutely demolish their industry and devastate the workers. It’s just that the textile industry was only a small part of the economy, and there were other industries who could absorb the displaced workers after they got retrained.
LLMs threaten almost every industry, so there is a greater worker impact and fewer places for displaced workers to go. Also now workers are responsible for bearing the costs of their own retraining, unlike back in the day of the luddites.
A very large amount of those dug up diamonds end up as “industrial diamonds.” Because they are far from gemstone quality. And they definitely get used up. I have used up my share of them as cutting tools when I was a toolmaker.
Ok cool, but this is an analogy. Why are you defending the use of AI by megacorps by objecting to irrelevant parts of an analogy on technicality?
It’s a bad analogy and just plain wrong fact. Do better.
You’re insufferable.
I know the analogy isn’t a perfect fit for LLMs in general. Analogies never come close to describing the entire thing they’re analogs of, they don’t need to.
It doesn’t matter because this is a suitable analogy for the argument. This is how analogies work.
The argument is that because the harm has already been done, it’s fine to use LLMs.
That same argument can be made for blood diamonds, and it’s untrue for exactly the same reason:
Because buying the use of LLMs (which is mostly how they’re used, even if you pay in data instead of money) is funding the continued harmful actions of the producer.
I can’t believe I have to explain how analogies are used to a grown ass adult.
I mean yeah: if we went and killed every person who benefits from conflict diamonds and closed all blood diamond mines why wouldn’t you be cool with using the resources? Their evil origin has little to do with their practical utility and if the original sin is expiated there’s no reason not to?
Like yeah conflict diamonds have basically no purpose because we can make diamonds cheaper and better in labs but in a situation where there are more practical uses (cobalt, LLMs) once we cleanse the land of the sinners why wouldn’t we use their ill gotten gains for good?
But we’re not “killing” every person who benefits, literally or figuratively. We’re continuing to buy their diamonds (pay them in money and data) while they continue to mine (train new models, use copyrighted material).
Agreed.
But the entire point I’m making is there’s nothing wrong with the diamonds, the problem is with the method and the people profiting from it.
You were saying the diamonds were not fine by dint of origin. I’m saying let’s right the wrong and then use the diamonds.
It’s not a perfect analogy, models ape the work of artists and take their jobs; it’s like if the diamond was bloody, and as long as it existed, the miner’s family not only didn’t get compensated for the loss but we’re also prevented from getting jobs themselves.
We’re not righting the wrong, were making the wrongs even worse. At some point you have to just burn the whole thing down.
Okay, so again, no new machine learning ever, unless you can prove it’s done without environmental impact or affecting peoples’ right to a dignified existence. That’s the wrong righted. That’s what you’re advocating. Am I misunderstanding?
Do the concepts “reparations” or “compensation for loss and damage” mean anything to you?
The people who were exploited should be the ones to benefit from those diamonds.
i mean probably, but this would be a question of what the law says. If we’re talking philosophy that’s irrelevant here, but to include it anyway, it would be something like “the most ethical source of any given item should be most preferred over any other source of said item” or if we’re operating under an ideology of anti-human exploitation idk where we would even start. You need a really concrete definition of exploitation, and how to combat it effectively, without just exploiting more people.
The law can eat my entire ass.
The fuck you think “using their ill gotten gains for good” means?
Sounds like you think we should use the diamonds. I wouldn’t be cool with using those diamonds because they belong to the people who were forced to mine them, not me.
well most of them are dead aren’t they? Are we going to put them back into their coffins? Or, how are we planning on redistributing these?
Dead people can’t own things, so that seems like an illogical conclusion, perhaps their estate or family? They didn’t do the work, but they would arguably be most entitled to it.
They had families, so yes, that’d be a good place to start reparations.
I see your point and agree with it, but I believe you read more defense in my comment than I tried to put in.
I’m not in favor of this waste.
Is Midjourney available for use locally now? Or have you misunderstood Midjourney taking 30 seconds to generate from their server as happening locally?
I know a guy that uses Stable Diffusion XL locally with a few LORAs, last time I’ve heard one 2k image took 2 minutes on RTX 30 or 40 something
IDK how expensive is Midjourney in comparison, but running it locally doesn’t sound impossible
The impossible part is that it isn’t publicly available. It’s not an open model.
Oh, ok. I’m not into image generation, so I didn’t know.
That sounds a bit too much. Generating an sdxl image and then scaling it up is the common procedure, but that should not take 2 minutes on a 40xx card. For reference I can generate 3 batches of 5 images (without the upscaling step) in less than 2 minutes on my 4070ti. And that’s without using faster sdxl models like lightning or turbo or whatever.