https://www.reddit.com/r/HelloInternet/comments/f0wuej/are_y...

I have a friend who only reads fiction for which he's seen the accompanying show first because he otherwise has no visual reference for the characters and environments.

AI, in some ways, might be our only saving grace at this point. It sure as Hell cannot cause people to do much worse.

The agentic tooling in some of the latest models is getting pretty crazy too - somebody on Reddit recently shared an example of using GPT-6 Astra to generate sprites with Aseprite, an open-source, popular pixel art editor and it worked shockingly well.

I have abandoned the work I was doing, but if you provide the image constraints along with some examples and descriptions of those examples using the terminology of your constraints, you should get something iterable.

AI is: 'my wife wanted better lighting in our reno pic thingy'

This is healthy and way in the range of normal, not dystopian.

That's going to be an issue of regulation and cost - not some arbitrary decision over 'whether I should make an image or just use text'.

Second - there are really not much in the way 'social or moral implications' for the most part.

This is a dystopian delusion that I'm hinting at here.

Folks are blowing this way out of proportion, and cynically so.

People now have 'automated Photoshop' and a slightly more power to express themselves. It's not going to change that much, and it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing. Mildly.

... for almost the last 40 years

"a deliberately deceitful and malicious comment."

This is a 'lost contact with reality' type of thing to say.

This thread is not about AI, it's entirely about people's ability to ground reality.

[1] https://petapixel.com/2015/02/20/a-blast-from-the-past-demos...

That game was developed before generating images became widespread, and sunset as that "art form" started really taking off (game-as-a-service... probably partly reverse engineered and retooled with AI too). So during its lifetime, it was pretty much AI free.

I remember having been seduced by that game's art style at the time. It wasn't "the usual guys with futuristic guns and armor", it had some stylization as well, nice color...

Watching the stream, it occurred to me that it was in fact artwork from "the days before", in a way I hadn't been hit with until that point, even as a returning artist looking at pre-AI works.

"People came up with the concepts and developed and rendered them themselves", I thought to myself. Not in a "oh look, floppy disks. How quaint!" way, either.

Weird feeling.

To be clear, I don’t mind a well-reasoned negative take on something, but much of the negatives takes I see here these days isn’t much better than Reddit, just hyper-exaggerated bitching and moaning about everything.

It echos sentiments of painters, intellectuals and odd religious moralists and other rabble rousers who spent decades raving against 'tHe eVIL pHoToGRaPH' in late 19th and early 20t century.

People can now make more expressive images than they could before, which is generally a good thing.

Of course, people could always use new technology for negative purposes - and - people have been using Photoshop for decades already to make 'fake nudes' - this is not a new phenomenon.

None of this is even a very big deal. We can make images now much more easily, that's it.

If anything, the fact that I know for a fact that I can, in 45 seconds, generate an image of any arbitrary person holding Solo cups at a party arm in arm with Vladimir Putin (to crib an idea from one of the demos) should make everyone less and less susceptible to blackmail in general - in fact, even if the source material is real! There was a time 40 years ago when a photograph's existence was considered proof of a fact - the existence of Photoshop-like tools made that into a weak proof, and the existence of genAI has made "a photograph" into a format that is known to be as malleable as a .txt file.

Whether we like that or not, no one will stop bad actors from attempting to abuse this technology, so democratizing its use does help people to understand how they work and make potential victims much less credulous.

Incredible alternative. Talk about depressing.

???

You mean to imply there's something 'more authentic' about paying $5 for a random Philippino guy to use Photoshop to mix-up some family photos with sticker overlays?

What are you even talking about?

On what level is that either more authentic, better for the environment, more novel ... of frankly better in any way?

That is 'not even an argument' - and so you're making my point for me:

People can now make images.

It's mostly for fun, some of it will be used professional, some Tweets will be a bit more visual - but that's it.

It's not going to change that much, and it's generally better on the whole for people to be able to create what they want.

People are putting this out of proportion.

Maybe I'm too old, but I've been around - this is not a big deal in the grand scheme.

And it's 'net slightly positive'.

Or, y'know, learn how to draw, or accept that it's not exactly going to be Chuck Jones caliber stuff.

What percentage is benign?

Do you have a source?

A hammer is great for pushing nails into wood. It also can crack someone’s skull with efficiency. I’m assuming you do not use hammers then, right?

Some of us find opportunities for the small joys that help offset the background radiation of despair.

It takes about 7 minutes for my RTX 5090 to generate a 15 second video with MiniMax H3. At 600 watts, that's 252,000 watt-seconds, or 0.07 kilowatt-hours.

My electricity is 18 cents/kWh, so $0.0126. Just a little over a penny.

I await OpenAI's carbon footprint field.

Separately--yes, I would love carbon receipts for everything. Such a system would be fascinating and do real good in this world.

It's really hard to believe that people care about the personal impact of their decisions, when it's only ever other peoples decisions that get talked about.

Thankfully web browsing is no where near that.

Most are closed systems. Water gets recycled. Water gets used like bathtubs and water bottles, right?

You cannot believe water is destroyed.

a golf course... at BEST has two or three foursomes on each hole on average at a time. so 36-48 players concurrently. accounting for less than perfect utilization it rounds to a rough throughput of about 1000 people per day per course. winter Exists and so you probably get like 20-50k people per year.

or maybe an easier term would be the estimated 160m people who played golf at least once last year.

which means that not only are we using that much water for so few people (.002% of the population) we are also reserving all of that space for so few people. for courses out in the middle of nowhere that doesn't matter but for example are thousands of acres of courses inside and near cities. one in LA reported 117k visits one year and that required dawn to dusk 365 play only possible in a climate like LA.

A typical course is ~150 acres so we could fit 50 soccer fields into that same space and service 3.2 million players. Ill spare the envelope math but its pretty hard to come up with any other use for that space/water that could serve less people.

ok one more example that doesn't need water either. just up the street from the high volume golf course is runyon canyon. similar size 150 acres, serves 1.5m visits a year.

Basically golf is a major waste of resources for very little benefit in basically every way possible, and should be zoned out of existence.

We need more green spaces, we need people to be active. Golf is a fairly quite sport, animals do foster around the greenery with golf courses. I would much rather a golf course than hot concrete everywhere.

How is the person supposed to know your opposing point of view if you don't tell it?

Some people feel the need to attach an image to almost everything the post - even in chat rooms (including slack at work). These images serve no purpose, but the poster feels it is useful - though it was often reaction gifs in the past I'm seeing a lot more AI content than I ever saw reaction gifs, maybe because of novelty or maybe because it's ultra personalised.

Sometimes images help to visualise something or to get a point across, but I see so many people who think it's necessary to reply to a discord message with a cat with human limbs doing a dance, or a photo of "themselves" climbing a mountain with the Rust logo to show them mastering Rust... Ok?

Image models are useful and I'm thankful for much better visual reasoning but it really really frustrates me the constant need to burn money for all of this slop.

>Generating 1,000 images with a powerful AI model, such as Stable Diffusion XL, is responsible for roughly as much carbon dioxide as driving the equivalent of 4.1 miles in an average gasoline-powered car. In contrast, the least carbon-intensive text generation model they examined was responsible for as much CO2 as driving 0.0006 miles in a similar vehicle