ClamDrinker

@ClamDrinker@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I do not share your experience about people that despise AI talking about it more, but if your community does, that’s great. But I am kind of skeptical that really is the case because of some of your statements.

  Most communities I see like that are incredibly rude and dismissive of people that see the positive sides of the technology, and even objective statements about the technology, are dismissed because they are not negative of the technology (eg. that AI is advancing medical research and healthcare, or also being used to stop scammers), and people that discuss that are mocked or ostracized by those groups. It’s cult like behavior, where only the group opinion is allowed. And if you even dare like something that was made with AI despite more and more media such as games uses it, even if you still have reasonable objections, oh boy.

  I highly disagree with your statement that hate and anger spreads an opinion far more easily, because it contains an assumption that people agree on it ahead of time. Take racism. I hope you’re a nice person, so seeing a wildly racist post hating on X people, show up on your feed isn’t suddenly going to make you think “Huh maybe they have a point, X people are to be hated.”, it just makes you very angry and resentful in return, with an opposing opinion, aka polarization. And that kills the conversation. For racism that’s kind of warranted, since the person with the irrational hatred isn’t to be taken seriously. And regardless of if the position is pro, neutral, or anti AI, if it is defended with irrationality, they will be the ones in this analogy. I equivalently denounce people that have no respect for artists and see AI as a way to kill the creative industry as I denounce people that pretend nothing good can ever come from AI and everyone that uses it is without a conscience or has no feeling for creativity.

  As for your points about fighting it, I cannot find any point in it that I agree with. Three or four years ago I would have entertained the notion that it might go away, but it has been showing up all over society. It’s an unattainable goal. Even if it somehow got banned in one country, that does not stop other countries around the world, with different cultures and values from using it, nor stop bad actors from using it so long as it cannot be proven to be AI. It’s like thinking because drugs are illegal, nobody is doing drugs. And to drive that point even further, positive uses such as certain drugs ending up being used for effective treatment of PTSD or chronic pain, end up being undiscovered. That’s the kind of world irrational reasoning builds.

  And by having an opinion that can only be satisfied by someone unequivocally agreeing with you, with no room for reasonable disagreeing on some aspects such as fair usage, it makes alliances that could actually get majorities to secure rights and fair treatment impossible.

  They do in the sense that all of them are driven by neophilia and big tent people horny for cash and power. See, this is the kind of statement I do denounce, and why I don’t really believe you are in a community that reasonably discusses AI. It’s such a close minded statement that is only applicable to most big companies that use AI. It doesn’t respect artists that use it whose work has been systematically undervalued, nor researchers that use it for the common good, nor any other use that has a reasonable grounds to not be considered the same.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented⁩ ⁨⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It can’t simultaneously be super easy and bad, yet also a massive propaganda tool. You can definitely dislike it for legitimate reasons though. I’m not trying to anger you or something, but if you know about #1, you should also know why it’s a good tool for misinformation. Or you might, as I proposed, be part of the group that incorrectly assumed they already know all about it and will be more likely to fall for AI propaganda in the future.

  eg. Trump posting pictures of him as the pope, with Gaza as a paradise, etc. These still have some AI tells, and Trump is a grifting moron with no morals or ethics, so even if it wasn’t AI you would still be skeptical. But one of these days someone like him that you don’t know ahead of time is going to make an image or a video that’s just plausible enough to spread virally. And it will be used to manufacture legitimacy for something horrible, as other propaganda has in the past.

  but why do we want it? What does it do for us?

  You yourself might not want it, and that’s totally fine.

  It’s a very helpful tool for creatives such as vfx artists and game developers, who are kind of masters of making things not real, seem real. The difference is, that they don’t want to lie or obfuscate what tools they use, but #2 gives them a huge incentive to do just that, not because they don’t want to disclose it, but because chronically overworked and underpaid people don’t also have time to deal with a hate mob on the side.

  If you don’t believe me that’s what they use it for, here’s a list of games on Steam with at least an 75% rating, 10000 reviews, and an AI disclosure.

  And that’s a self perpetuating cycle. People hide their AI usage to avoid hate -> making less people aware of the depths of what it can be used for, making them only think AI slop or other obviously AI generated material is all it can do -> which makes them biased towards any kind of AI usage because they think it’s easy to use well or just lazy to use -> in turn making people hide their AI usage more.

  By giving creatives the room to teach others about what AI helped them do, regardless of wanting to like or dislike it, such as through behind the scenes, artbooks, guides, etc. We increase the awareness in the general population about what it can actually do, and that it is being used. Just imagine a world where you never knew about the existence of VFX, or just thought it was used for explosions and nothing else.

  PS. Bitcoin is still around and decently big, I’m not a fan of that myself, but that’s just objective reality. NFTs have always been mostly good for scams. But really, these technologies have little to no bearing on the debate around AI, history is littered with technologies that didn’t end up panning out, but it’s the ones that do that cause shifts. AI is such a technology in my eyes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t say AI would solve that, but I’ll re-iterate the point I’m making differently:

  1. Spreading awareness of how AI operates, what it does, what it doesn’t, what it’s good at, what it’s bad at, how it’s changing, (Such as knowing there are hundreds if not thousands of regularly used AI models out there, some owned by corporations, others open source, and even others somewhere in between), reduces misconceptions and makes people more skeptical when they see material that might have been AI generated or AI assisted being passed off as real. This is especially important to teach during transition periods such as now when AI material is still more easily distinguishable from real material.

  2. People creating a hostile environment where AI isn’t allowed to be discussed, analyzed, or used in ethical and good faith manners, make it more likely some people who desperately need to be aware of #1 stay ignorant. They will just see AI as a boogeyman, failing to realize that eg. AI slop isn’t the only type of material that AI can produce. This makes them more susceptible to seeing something made by AI and believing or misjudging the reality of the material.

  3. Corporations, and those without the incentive to use AI ethically, will not be bothered by #2, and will even rejoice people aren’t spending time on #1. It will make it easier for them to claw AI technology for themselves through legislation and walled gardens, and the less knowledge there is in the general population, the more easily it can be used to influence people. Propaganda works, and the propagandist is always looking for technology that allows them to reach more people, and ill informed people are easier to manipulate.

  4. And lastly, we must reward those that try to achieve #1 and avoid #2, while punishing those in #3. We must reward those that use the technology as ethically and responsibly as possible, as any prospect of completely ridding the world of AI are just futile at this point, and in between is a massive amount of pitfalls where #3 will gain the upper hand.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Did you respond to the wrong person? The article nor my comment was about one specific AI model.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the inevitable end game of some groups of people trying to make AI usage taboo using anger and intimidation without room for reasonable disagreement. The ones devoid morals and ethics will use it to their hearts content and would never interact with your objections anyways, and when the general public is ignorant of what it is and what it can really do, people get taken advantage off.

  Support open source and ethical usage of AI, where artists, creatives, and those with good intentions are not caught in your legitimate grievances with corporate greed, totalitarians, and the like. We can’t reasonably make it go away, but we can reduce harmful use of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  While there are spaces that are luckily still looking at it neutrally and objectively, there are definitely leftist spaces where AI hatred has snuck in, even to a reality-denying degree where lies about what AI is or isn’t has taken hold, and where providing facts to refute such things are rejected purely because it goes against the norm.

  And I can’t help but agree that they are being played so that the only AI technology that will eventually be feasible will not be open source, and in control of the very companies left learning folks have dislike or hatred for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The absolute irony

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I never claimed anything besides that breakthroughs did happen since you claimed, which is objectively true. You claimed very concretely that AI was the same for over a decade, aka it was the same in at least 2015 if I’m being charitable, all of these things were researched in the last 7-8 years and only became products in the last 5 years.

  Man this is some dishonesty.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Breakthroughs are not a myth. They still happen even when the process is iterative. That page even explains it. The advent of the GAN (2014-2018), which got overtaken by transformers in around 2017 for which GPTs and Diffusion models later got developed on. More hardware is what allowed those technologies to work better and bigger but without those breakthroughs you still wouldnt have the AI boom of today.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  ML technology has existed for a while, but it’s wild to claim that the technology pre-2020 is the same. A breakthrough happened.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa among artists urging British Prime Minister Starmer to rethink his AI copyright plans⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh I agree money talks in the US justice system, but as the page shows, these laws also exist elsewhere, such as in the EU. And even if I or you don’t agree with them, they are still the case law that determines the legality of these things. For me that aligns with my ethical stance as well, but probably not yours.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa among artists urging British Prime Minister Starmer to rethink his AI copyright plans⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I never claimed that in this case. As I said in my response: There have been won lawsuits that machines are allowed to index and analyze copyrighted material without infringing on such rights, so long as they only extract objective information, such as what AI typically extracts. I’m not a lawyer, and your jurisdiction may differ, but this page has a good overview: blog.apify.com/is-web-scraping-legal/

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa among artists urging British Prime Minister Starmer to rethink his AI copyright plans⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Outside of the marketing labels of “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning”, it’s nothing like real intelligence or learning at all.

  Generative AI uses artificial neural networks, which are based on how we understand brains to connect information (Biological neural networks). You’re right that they have no self generated input like humans do, but their sense of making connections between information is very similar to that of humans. It doesn’t really matter that they don’t have their own experiences, because they are not trying to be humans, they are trying to be as flexible of a ‘mind’ as possible.

  Are you an artist or a creative person?

  I see anti-AI people say this stuff all the time too. Because it’s a convenient excuse to disregard an opposing opinion as ‘doesn’t know art’, failing to realize or respect that most people have some kind of creative spark and outlet. And I know it wasn’t aimed at me, but before you think I’m dodging the question, I’m a creative working professionally with artists and designers.

  Professional creative people and artists use AI too. A lot. Probably more than laypeople, because to use it well and combine it with other interesting ideas, requires a creative and inventive mind. There’s a reason AI is making it’s way all over media, into movies, into games, into books. And I don’t mean as AI slop, but well-implemented, guided AI usage.

  I could ask you as well if you’ve ever studied programming, or studied psychology, as those things would all make you more able to understand the similarities between artificial neural networks and biological neural networks. But I don’t need a box to disregard you, the substance of your argument fails to convince me.

  At the end of the day, it does matter that humans have their own experiences to mix in. But AI can also store much, much more influences than a human brain can. That effectively means for everything it makes, there is less of a specific source in there from specific artists.

  For example, the potential market effects of generating an automated system which uses people’s artwork to directly compete against them.

  Fair use considerations do not apply to works that are so substantially different from any influence, only when copyrighted material is directly re-used. If you read Harry Potter and write your own novel about wizards, you do not have to credit nor pay royalties to JK Rowling, so long as it isn’t substantially similar. Without any additional laws prohibiting such, AI is no different. To sue someone over fair use, you typically do have to prove that it infringes on your work, and so far there have not been any successful cases with that argument.

  Most negative externalities from AI come from capitalism: Greedy bosses thinking they can replace true human talent with a machine, plagiarists that use it as a convenient tool to harass specific artists, scammers that use it to scam people. But around that exists an entire ecosystem of people just using it for what it should be used for: More and more creativity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa among artists urging British Prime Minister Starmer to rethink his AI copyright plans⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You picked the wrong thread for a nuanced question on a controversial topic.

  But it seems the UK indeed has laws for this already if the article is to believed, as they don’t currently allow AI companies to train on copyrighted material (As per the article). As far as I know, in some other jurisdictions, a normal person would absolutely be allowed to pull a bunch of publicly available information, learn from it, and decide to make something new based on objective information that can be found within. And generally, that’s the rationale for AI companies used as well, seeing as there have been landmark cases ruled in the past to not be copyright infringement with wide acceptance for computers analyzing copyrighted information, such as against Google, for indexing copyrighted material in their search results. But perhaps an adjacent ruling was never accepted in the UK (which does seem strange, as Google does operate). But laws are messy, and perhaps there is an exception somewhere, and I’m certainly not an expert on UK law.

  But people sadly don’t really come into this thread to discuss the actual details, they just see a headline that invokes a feeling of “AI Bad”, and so you coming in here with a reasonable question makes you a target. I wholly expect to be downvoted as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The clueless people are out there among us⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah I agree that’s a fair enough assumption 😄

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The clueless people are out there among us⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Never assumed you did :), but yes, as little assumptions is the best. But as you can already tell, it’s hard to communicate when you take no assumptions when people make explicit statements crafted to dispel assumptions, that are entirely plausible for a hypothetical real person to have.

  In fact, your original statement of “They have no doubts. Never occurred to them it might be a joke…”, is in itself a pretty big assumption. Unless, of course. I assume that statement to be a hyperbole, or even satire. But if we want to have fun talking about a shitpost we do kind of have to take an assumptive position on the meme that can’t talk back.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The clueless people are out there among us⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  People making assumptions is the issue.

  There’s assumptions involved in detecting satire from just text as well. You would just have a Reverse Poe’s law where “any extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for satire of those views without clear indicator of the author’s intent”.

  Normally when people say things we (justifiably) assume that to be what they mean, which is why satire works much better in person because intonation can make the satire explicit without changing the words or saying it out loud.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  One likely reason the backlash has been so strong is because, on a platform as close-knit as Reddit, betrayal cuts deep.

  Another laughable quote after the APIcalypse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The first hakurei miko⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Would be fun if we ever got some more insight into the previous Mikos, I’d have said it wasnt gonna happen some time ago but we did get Misumaru in TH18

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Touhou 20 「東方錦上京 〜 Fossilized Wonders.」to be released this summer⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Very excited to see what ZUN has in store for us for his 20th title!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anthropic has developed an AI 'brain scanner' to understand how LLMs work and it turns out the reason why chatbots are terrible at simple math and hallucinate is weirder than you thought⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Except as you demonstrated, it requires quite a few leaps of interpretation, assuming the worst interpretations of OP’s statement, which is why it’s silly. OP clearly limited their statement to themselves and AI.

  Now if OP said, “everyone should use a calculator or die”, maybe then it would have been a valid response.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨3's grip looks the most comfy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Surprised I had to scroll down so far to find 3, it’s just the same as 5 but with better grip around the finger tips, which avoids the pen from twisting when you hold it tightly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ah shit. Here we go again.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Still better than having to go right as you step under the water, and then having to perform a sacred rain dance to hold it in

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do AI bros and other staunch AI defenders seem happy about the potential of killing off the creative industries?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m someone who talks about AI a lot on lemmy, people might call me pro AI although I consider myself to be neither pro nor anti, but admittedly, optimistic about AI in general. I work with people in the creative industry, artists, writers, designers, you name it.

  As others have mentioned already, your question to my knowledge does not reflect most people’s view on AI neither online and even less so in real life. And I talk and participate in communities that are overwhelmingly pro AI. The “AI bros” you mention sound like caricatures to me.

  There are some who have become bitter by lies and misinformation spread about AI that are intentionally hateful as a kind of reverse gotcha, but thats about it. You have those on the anti AI side as well for different reasons.

  I dont consider AI to be anywhere close to being a threat to the industry, other than indirectly through the forces of capitalism and mismanagement. Your question indeed seems very insane to me. Most people that use and talk about AI to me seem more interested in using it to make new creative works, or enhance existing works to greater depth in the same time. Creative people are human too and have limited time, and often their time is already cut short by deadlines and their work has been systematically undervalued even before AI.

  AI as it currently stands on its own simply has no feeling of direction. Without much effort you can get very pretty, elegant, interesting, but ultimately meaningless things from it. This cannot replace anyone, because such content while intriguing doesnt capture attention for long. It also cannot do complex tasks such as discussing with stakeholders or remaining consistent across work and feedback.

  With a creative person at the wheel of the AI though, something special can happen. It can give AI the direction it needs to bring back that meaning.

  This is a perspective a lot of people miss, since they only see AI as ChatGPT or Midjourney, not realizing that these are proprietary (not open source) front ends to the technology that essentially hide all the controls and options the technology has, because these things are essentially a new craft on their own and to this day very little people are even in the progress of mastering them.

  Everyone knows about prompts, but you can do much more than that depending on the model. Some image models allow you to provide your own input image, and even additional images that control aspects of the image like depth, layout, outlines. And text models allow you to pack a ton of pre existing data that completely guide what it will output next, as well as provide control over the internal math that decides how it comes to its guess for the next word.

  Without a creative and inventive person behind the wheel, you get generic AI material we all know. And with such a person, you get material at times indistinguishable from normal material. These people are already plentiful in the creative industry, and they are not going anywhere, and new people that meet this criteria are always welcome. Art is for everyone, and especially those who are driven.

  Really the only threat to the creative industry in regards to AI is that some wish to bully and coerce those who use the technology into submission and force them to reject it, and even avoid considering it altogether like dogma. This creates a submissive group that will never learn how to operate AI models. Should AI ever become neccesary to work in the creative industry (it currently doesnt look like it) these people will be absolutely decimated by the ones that kept an open mind, and more importantly, the youth of tomorrow that always is more open to new technologies. This is a story of the ages whenever new technology comes around, as it never treats those that reject it kindly, if it sticks around.

  The loom and the Luddites, cars and horses, cameras and painters, mine workers and digging machines, human calculators and mechanical calculators, the list goes on.

  So no, being pro AI doesnt neccesarily mean you are participating in the downfall of the creative industry. Neither does being anti AI. But spreading falsehoods and stifling healthy discussion, that can kill any industry except those built on dishonesty.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta’s AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Stocks for what? AI? I can’t have stocks for a technology. I could get stocks in companies that use AI, but the only ones that are on the stock market I’d rather die than support a single penny to. But they are not the only ones using the technology.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta’s AI Profiles Are Already Polluting Instagram and Facebook With Slop⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Seems a bit strange to blame AI for this. Meta has always been garbage and using technology to it’s worst effects.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI Generated X⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  While I’m not particularly fond of using AI for any kind of truthful information, this post reeks of the classic “Quit having fun!” meme. Your value judgement of AI is no more valid than anyone elses, and honestly in my opinion, very misdirected and anger fueled.

  It’s in everyone’s best interest for AI content to be honestly declared. You are almost certainly already consuming AI content from somewhere without knowing it because angry hate mobs have conditioned people to just lie and obfuscate their AI usage to avoid being the target of your hate. And if not, you will eventually due to the power of the technology, as the entire creative industry is already silently intergrating it, as everyone with an open mind knows, but the benefit of honesty towards closed minded angry people is none, and that status quo is a shame.

  Good AI usage is impossible to detect, and we should encourage honesty in regards to it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sure such cases exist, but where I’m from people don’t really get paid to host turbines, maybe companies at times. They dislike them because it affects the view in the area, and especially if you live very close to them the blades can cause noticeable flickering shadows. That latter point has a lot more weight to it in my eyes, but people do really care about the former as well, and it’s kind of hard to push on people when they live there and not you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There is competition in battery production. Pretty much all of society would be better off with better batteries, so price gauging in an industry like that is quite hard. And if it was, it would not go unnoticed.

  The problem is simply the technology. There’s advancements like molten salt batteries, but it’s practically in it’s infancy. The moment a technology like that would become a big improvement over the norm, it would pretty much immediately cause a paradigm shift in energy production and every company would want a piece of the pie. So you’ll know it when you see it. But it might also just start off very overwhelmingly like nuclear fission and very gradually improved with the hope it can scale beyond the current best technologies for batteries.

  All we can do is wait and hope for breakthrough, I guess. Because cheap and abundant batteries could really help massively with reducing our carbon output.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon questions our energy sector⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  2160 GW is it’s rated capacity. I’m not sure how you got from there to 14.2 dollars per watt, but it completely ignores the lifetime of the power plant.

  Vogtle 3&4 are really a bad example because unit 4 only entered commercial activity this year. But fine, we can look at what it produces just recently.. About 3335000 MWh per month, or about 107 GWh per day. We can then subtract the baseline from Reactor 1 & 2 from before Reactor 3 was opened, removing about 1700000 MWh per month. Which gives us about 53 GWh per day. The lifetime of them is expected to be around 60 to 80 year, but lets take 60. That’s about 1177200 GWh over it’s lifetime, divided by the 36 billion that it cost to built… Gives you about 0.03 dollars per kWh. Which is pretty much as good as renewables get as well. But of course, this ignores maintenance, but that’s hard to calculate for solar panels as well. As such it will be somewhat larger than 0.03, I will admit.

  Solar panels on the other hand, often have a lifetime of 30 years, so even though it costs less per watt, MW, or GW, it also produces less over time. For solar, and wind, that’s about the same.. So this doesn’t really say much.

  But that wasn’t even the point of my message. As I said, I agree that Nuclear is slightly more expensive than renewables. But there are other costs associated with renewables that aren’t expressed well in monetary value for their units alone. Infrastructure, space, approval, experts to maintain it.

  Let’s ignore that no grid in the country actually needs 10hr storage yet. Because they cannot. They can’t do it because there’s not enough capacity. If the sun is cloudy for a day, and the wind doesn’t run. Who’s going to power the grid for a day? That’s right. Mostly coal and gas. That’s the point. Nuclear is there to ensure we don’t go back to fossils when we want to be carbon neutral, which means no output. If you are carbon neutral only when the weather is perfect for renewables, then you’re not really carbon neutral and still would have to produce a ton of pollution at times.

  I’m glad batteries and all are getting cheaper. They are definitely needed, also for nuclear. But you must also be aware of just how damn dirty they are to produce. The minerals required produce them are rare, and expensive. Wind power also kills people that need to maintain it. Things aren’t so black and white.

  Also consider that PV and batteries have always gotten cheaper over time, while nuclear has always gotten more expensive.

  This is not true, and it should be obvious when you think about it. Since this data fluctuates all the time. Nuclear has been more expensive in the past, before getting cheaper, and now getting more expensive again. Solar and wind have had peaks of being far more expensive than before. These numbers are just a representation of aggregate data, and they often leave out nuance like renewables being favored by regulations and subsidies. They are in part a manifestation of the resistance to nuclear. Unlike renewables, there are many more steps to be made for efficiency in nuclear. Most development has (justifiably) been focused on safety so far, as with solar and wind and batteries we can look away from the slave labor on the other side of the world to produce the rare earth metals needed for it. There is no free lunch in this world.

  For what it’s purpose should be, which is to provide a baseline production of electricity when renewables are not as effective. A higher price can be justified. It’s not meant to replace renewables altogether. Because if renewables can’t produce clean energy, their price might as well be infinitely high in that moment, which leaves our only options to be fossil fuels, hydro, batteries, or nuclear. Fossil fuels should be obvious, not everyone has hydro (let alone enough), batteries don’t have the capacity or numbers at the scale required (for the foreseeable future), and nuclear is here right now.