Comment on There's now more people that complain about AI then there is AI content on Lemmy

• univers3man@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  The problem I see with that is even though it’s local (which is a huge step towards FOSS ownership instead of private hidden control), it still takes tons of energy to train the model itself. Not to mention the IP theft which is a whole 'nother issue.

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  • Lumisal@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    If a single model uses 1Gw of energy (it doesn’t) being trained but 300 million people use it, then it used 3.33 watts of energy per person, and that’s assuming if it was only used a single time.

    Using a 900w toaster 8 times to toast 2 slices of bread uses a bit more, at 3.6w - 0.45w for 3 minutes of toasting.

    So, I’m not sure if that’s true.

    Also, you can use a model which didn’t use IP theft, like Mistral, for LLM, or Photoshop for image gen. That is, if you consider the way it trains IP theft. But then, you’d be supporting corporations like Adobe.

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    • princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Photoshop are literally stealing their customers images to train their AIs: mashable.com/…/adobe-users-outaged-new-policy-tra…

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      • Lumisal@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I know they had been paying Getty or some stock image company initially for the AI out painting, but I’m not surprised they’re now pulling they shenanigan.

        They’re not stealing since it’s part of their terms. But it’s also definitely not ethical. If anything that’s a valuable lesson to read the ToS.

        And more the reason to not use Photoshop.

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    • Nollij@sopuli.xyz ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Watts (and gigawatts) are not a unit of energy. They are a unit of power, or you can think of it as a rate.

      900 watts for an hour is 900 watt-hours, or 0.9 kWh. For 24 minutes (3 minutes x8) is 360 Wh, or 0.36kWh.

      All of the major public LLM and diffusion models (ChatGPT, copilot, Grok, etc) are absolutely using more than a gigawatt. And I mean constantly. They are trying to create nuclear power plants exclusively to power an AI Datacenter. You could math out how much that is per query (not per person), but it’s absolutely insane.

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      • Lumisal@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        We were just talking about the energy used to train a model, not the usage itself.

        I mentioned in a comment further down that usage would be significantly higher than training, because of the amount it’s done, the hardware used, and the frequency.

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    • univers3man@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I admit I didn’t know that Mistral or Photoshop claim to use no copyrighted material, but I am loathe to support Adobe as you seem to correctly imply.

      On the topic of power usage, we can assume 1Gw. But 300 million people using the same model as was trained via that inital 1Gw input seems like a stretch for as much as OpenAI / releases models / tweaks. And the root of my problem with the power draw is that it’s not coming from clean or renewal sources so it’s not just the 1Gw of usage, but all the pollution that comes with it. Not to mention the datacenters using water for evap cooling and taking water from towns.

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      • Lumisal@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Yes, 1Gw was a hyperbolic exaggeration.

        I looked it up now out of curiosity and it’s estimated training a state of the art LLM (image gen uses significantly less) at trillions of parameters uses about 10-20,000kw, which is 1-2% of 1Gw. So apparently if that model is used by 300 million people (which is less than the population of the USA, and it’d be accurate to say a popular model would have about that much usage if not more), it would actually be about 0.036-0.067w per person, or toasting bread for less than 10 seconds.

        So training a model does use a lot of electricity, but considering how much it’s used / how often, using it definitely generates more than training it I’d say.

        I was also implying using the model locally on your own hardware rather than a data center. Local uses less energy because the hardware doesn’t use as much power. It’s also much slower, but it’s also not destructive like an AI data center.

        And yup, Adobe paid for the training data used. But, you know, Adobe. But ultimately, something large and centralized would be the only way to run the tech if we’re expecting it to be useable as is.

        My personal ethics are if it’s used for personal use and not by a corporation, it’s fine and ethical. After all, Linux is based of code very very few people get paid to make, if paid at all. If all those separate people had to start paying for each bit if code, Linux couldn’t exist either. That said, I think compiling it all is it’s own heavy work too. After all, just like the separate code won’t spontaneously become a Linux OS, separate pieces of art/books won’t spontaneously combine to make something new.

        I donate and pay when I can, probably more so than most on Lemmy, for music , software, art, etc; even though it’s hard for me to afford to. But if it’s in public, it’s strange to be surprised when someone uses it. After all, there’s no reason to post anything you make online - that’s a choice that was made.

        What I do strongly disagree is a corporation (in particular large ones with plenty of money really) doing it for profit. Such as Meta did with pirating books.

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