Solarpunk, to me, is about the beauty of what humans can accomplish with technology not subjected to the cult of perpetual growth that is capitalism. It’s about taking only what you need and then helping meet your neighbors needs next; efficiency and growth for the purposes of a clean environment, a fulfilling existence, and a future to look forward to.
Current AI implementations are extremely resource intensive, especially compared to the value they create. This energy demand has to be met from somewhere, and our grid of renewable energy is certainly not covering the excess in the US.
In a broader comparison, how cruel to leave human artists struggling under capitalism while machines produce art, based off of the hard work of those same human artists.
AI can produce good results when trained ethically (see the Japanese bakery AI detecting cancer cells!), but the majority of AI products for consumer use today are polluting our environment for novelties at best and misinformation at worst. The technology is interesting, but the implementations now are 99% not great.
Current AI implementations are extremely resource intensive, especially compared to the value they create. This energy demand has to be met from somewhere, and our grid of renewable energy is certainly not covering the excess in the US.
That’s simply not true. AI training takes a bit of energy and even then, it is modest. Llama2 70B, a model that fed the open source community for a year emitted about the same as one international flight. Using these models is actually using a laughably small amount of energy. It takes about 0.04 Wh on my machine to generate one image.
In a broader comparison, how cruel to leave human artists struggling under capitalism while machines produce art, based off of the hard work of those same human artists.
I feel you are blaming AI because you assume capitalism is unmovable.
The ability to more easily create art and make it something that becomes far more accessible to everyone without having to make any commercial transactions (many models are open source) is pretty solarpunkish, or at least utopian in my book. We are freeing art creation (and programming, LLMs are pretty decent at this craft) from the mercantile world. Granted, I would have preferred that we started with more down-to-earth productive tasks like farming or manufacturing but the problems would be the same: we used to need to pay people to do it, and now we don’t. That’s great for society, that sucks for them. This is the thing we need to address: all jobs are going to be replaced in the next 2 decades and we urgently need a post-labor mindset and vision.
I’m not speaking about AI usage for a singular operation, but instead the massive scales of commercial AI products.
Last month, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman finally admitted what researchers have been saying for years — that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is heading for an energy crisis. It’s an unusual admission. At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Altman warned that the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said.
I don’t think there’s a way to decouple current AI usage with its exploititive use under capitalism, and that usage is what I am criticizing. Right here and now, it is not serving solarpunk ideals by stealing from artists and regurgitating hands that don’t make sense and solar panels that look like waves. Maybe the broader ethics could be explored in a post-capitalism, post intellectual property landscape, but that doesn’t materially affect the world in which we live and make decisions today. And it is that circumstance that this post was made, not an idealized world.
Sam Altman invested half a billion in a fusion company and needs people to believe AI requires big datacenters (which is false, but they need to convince the public of that). The trend is making smaller, lighter models that are as capable as the big ones. We do have footprints of Meta models, which are competitive with OpenAI’s. We are nowhere near it being an energy problem.
I don’t think there’s a way to decouple current AI usage with its exploititive use under capitalism,
There is. Open source is a non-capitalist movement (technically it is anarchist and communist, despite most people participating in it not calling themselves that) and most models used today, right now, in our world, are open models. They don’t do the headlines. I am pretty sure OP used StableDiffusion (the glitches on the panels look like it).
The post-capitalist world is being built today. Don’t wait for it like an abstract and distant future society. The seeds of it were planted a while ago, they germinated and the roots are healthy. We should stop stomping on them by pretending they do not exist.
i wouldn’t mix the post-labor with ‘‘ai’’ because they are overhyping it just for the usual capital needs;
i agree on the rest of the answer tho, i feel like listening to someone saying you can’t take a photo because you have to draw or paint them to show your skills
to me, art is something that wants to express an idea or a feeling in some performative way. we can say that generating without adding anything is a bit cheap, a bit like a doodle compared to a finished opera, but i don’t like to divide art from non-art just for the instruments used
i wouldn’t mix the post-labor with ‘‘ai’’ because they are overhyping it just for the usual capital needs;
I am anticapitalist, I am an engineer working in the field, I am seeing my own, actual 15+ years of pro experience being more and more replaced with AI when it comes to coding. I am seeing that 2024 is going to be the year of AI on robots
This is not hype. This is real, this is here. Capital has nothing to do with it (a lot happens in research labs and open source communities) and actually the capitalist social contract will really show its limit with that. We need to stop being in denial and form proposals for a post-labor society, which I can’t imagine being capitalist.
i’m part of tech workers coalition, using ‘‘AI’’ hype to leverage some firings of bullshit jobs is just to make shareholders happy and workers scared
i can agree that the technology is here but i’ve kept using “AI” in quotes because as you also know there is nothing about artificial intelligence, it’s very much still a machine learning stage
AI is the capital trend and companies that cannot benefit directly from it are doing the firings to still be nice to the shareholders
let’s call it machine learning and let’s acknowledge that we already had way a lot of bullshit jobs in society: if being able to fire people keeping the same productivy was a sign of post-labor we’ve been living signs of it for looooot of times.
and i don’t say it’s impossible, just saying that post-labor or post-labor just for rich people is really a matter of how we shape society more than how technology evolves under the will of capitalism
i hope i don’t come out as harsh, it’s late and i’m a bit tired so i may be using a tone i don’t want to use, i’m not native in english w.w
Honestly at this point I am kind of happy that even for researchers, the taboo of calling the field “AI” is gone. No, there is actual emergent intelligence displayed in generative models. I wish we could manage to marvel at this for a while outside of all this noise. Will it be enough to reach AGI? At this point no one knows but calling it AI? Yes, there is more than hype to it. It “understands” natural language, for many reasonable and useful definitions of “understand”.
and i don’t say it’s impossible, just saying that post-labor or post-labor just for rich people is really a matter of how we shape society more than how technology evolves under the will of capitalism
Which is why I tire of people who assume technology only evolves under the will of capitalism and fail to acknowledge that most models used today are free and open source. That a lot of the tooling around them is made by the community non-commercially.
Open source is actually a model of organization that I believe has the potential for proposing a viable alternative to capitalism and has proven so by tackling projects that were too large even for big companies.
based off of the hard work of those same human artists
copyright and copyleft are needed just because we live in capitalism and so they can be instruments to defend yourself from it but it’s more solarpunk to have every information as a libre common
how cruel to leave human artists struggling under capitalism while machines produce art
not like they were fine before these new models, workers power keeps decreasing unless a category starts to fight. look how writers in hollywood actually saved themself from all of this.
Unionizing, like therapy or gym, is not possible to be bestowed upon people against their will. It’s sad but apparently works better if everyone unionize their own category…
I feel like you are misinterpreting my words here. Like I said, AI can be used well, and I’m all for ethical AI usage! Being mindful about how we use technology and what costs are implied by that use is what’s important.
Sure you can apply the argument of it’s just one person, or one GPU or one car. But that’s not reality.
Millions of GPUs crunch numbers in datacenters to feed the AI consoomers. I see solarpunk as valuing principle over practicalties and a strong emphasis on taking responsibility. Therefore if this image was generated using a GPU demanding model, it contributes to that AI footprint. Therefore, it is not solarpunk.
Its ok if you disagree but i dont believe our ideals are obtainable without the help of ai.
Its true its not sustainable energy wise in current form but neither are devices most people use to access this sub.
I can also train and use stable diffusion models for as
Much power as it takes me to run a modern video game and this movement will lose momentum quick if no more video games becomes a thing.
Instead focus your energy on the big tech companies that do so much more harm including unethical use of ai.
Is this AI generated? Not very solarpunk if so :(
Solarpunk newbie here. Why not?
Solarpunk, to me, is about the beauty of what humans can accomplish with technology not subjected to the cult of perpetual growth that is capitalism. It’s about taking only what you need and then helping meet your neighbors needs next; efficiency and growth for the purposes of a clean environment, a fulfilling existence, and a future to look forward to.
Current AI implementations are extremely resource intensive, especially compared to the value they create. This energy demand has to be met from somewhere, and our grid of renewable energy is certainly not covering the excess in the US.
In a broader comparison, how cruel to leave human artists struggling under capitalism while machines produce art, based off of the hard work of those same human artists.
AI can produce good results when trained ethically (see the Japanese bakery AI detecting cancer cells!), but the majority of AI products for consumer use today are polluting our environment for novelties at best and misinformation at worst. The technology is interesting, but the implementations now are 99% not great.
That’s simply not true. AI training takes a bit of energy and even then, it is modest. Llama2 70B, a model that fed the open source community for a year emitted about the same as one international flight. Using these models is actually using a laughably small amount of energy. It takes about 0.04 Wh on my machine to generate one image.
I feel you are blaming AI because you assume capitalism is unmovable.
The ability to more easily create art and make it something that becomes far more accessible to everyone without having to make any commercial transactions (many models are open source) is pretty solarpunkish, or at least utopian in my book. We are freeing art creation (and programming, LLMs are pretty decent at this craft) from the mercantile world. Granted, I would have preferred that we started with more down-to-earth productive tasks like farming or manufacturing but the problems would be the same: we used to need to pay people to do it, and now we don’t. That’s great for society, that sucks for them. This is the thing we need to address: all jobs are going to be replaced in the next 2 decades and we urgently need a post-labor mindset and vision.
I’m not speaking about AI usage for a singular operation, but instead the massive scales of commercial AI products.
Source
Another
I don’t think there’s a way to decouple current AI usage with its exploititive use under capitalism, and that usage is what I am criticizing. Right here and now, it is not serving solarpunk ideals by stealing from artists and regurgitating hands that don’t make sense and solar panels that look like waves. Maybe the broader ethics could be explored in a post-capitalism, post intellectual property landscape, but that doesn’t materially affect the world in which we live and make decisions today. And it is that circumstance that this post was made, not an idealized world.
AI is not just OpenAI.
Sam Altman invested half a billion in a fusion company and needs people to believe AI requires big datacenters (which is false, but they need to convince the public of that). The trend is making smaller, lighter models that are as capable as the big ones. We do have footprints of Meta models, which are competitive with OpenAI’s. We are nowhere near it being an energy problem.
There is. Open source is a non-capitalist movement (technically it is anarchist and communist, despite most people participating in it not calling themselves that) and most models used today, right now, in our world, are open models. They don’t do the headlines. I am pretty sure OP used StableDiffusion (the glitches on the panels look like it).
The post-capitalist world is being built today. Don’t wait for it like an abstract and distant future society. The seeds of it were planted a while ago, they germinated and the roots are healthy. We should stop stomping on them by pretending they do not exist.
i wouldn’t mix the post-labor with ‘‘ai’’ because they are overhyping it just for the usual capital needs;
i agree on the rest of the answer tho, i feel like listening to someone saying you can’t take a photo because you have to draw or paint them to show your skills
to me, art is something that wants to express an idea or a feeling in some performative way. we can say that generating without adding anything is a bit cheap, a bit like a doodle compared to a finished opera, but i don’t like to divide art from non-art just for the instruments used
I am anticapitalist, I am an engineer working in the field, I am seeing my own, actual 15+ years of pro experience being more and more replaced with AI when it comes to coding. I am seeing that 2024 is going to be the year of AI on robots
This is not hype. This is real, this is here. Capital has nothing to do with it (a lot happens in research labs and open source communities) and actually the capitalist social contract will really show its limit with that. We need to stop being in denial and form proposals for a post-labor society, which I can’t imagine being capitalist.
i’m part of tech workers coalition, using ‘‘AI’’ hype to leverage some firings of bullshit jobs is just to make shareholders happy and workers scared
i can agree that the technology is here but i’ve kept using “AI” in quotes because as you also know there is nothing about artificial intelligence, it’s very much still a machine learning stage
AI is the capital trend and companies that cannot benefit directly from it are doing the firings to still be nice to the shareholders
let’s call it machine learning and let’s acknowledge that we already had way a lot of bullshit jobs in society: if being able to fire people keeping the same productivy was a sign of post-labor we’ve been living signs of it for looooot of times.
and i don’t say it’s impossible, just saying that post-labor or post-labor just for rich people is really a matter of how we shape society more than how technology evolves under the will of capitalism
i hope i don’t come out as harsh, it’s late and i’m a bit tired so i may be using a tone i don’t want to use, i’m not native in english w.w
Honestly at this point I am kind of happy that even for researchers, the taboo of calling the field “AI” is gone. No, there is actual emergent intelligence displayed in generative models. I wish we could manage to marvel at this for a while outside of all this noise. Will it be enough to reach AGI? At this point no one knows but calling it AI? Yes, there is more than hype to it. It “understands” natural language, for many reasonable and useful definitions of “understand”.
Which is why I tire of people who assume technology only evolves under the will of capitalism and fail to acknowledge that most models used today are free and open source. That a lot of the tooling around them is made by the community non-commercially.
Open source is actually a model of organization that I believe has the potential for proposing a viable alternative to capitalism and has proven so by tackling projects that were too large even for big companies.
copyright and copyleft are needed just because we live in capitalism and so they can be instruments to defend yourself from it but it’s more solarpunk to have every information as a libre common
not like they were fine before these new models, workers power keeps decreasing unless a category starts to fight. look how writers in hollywood actually saved themself from all of this.
Unionizing, like therapy or gym, is not possible to be bestowed upon people against their will. It’s sad but apparently works better if everyone unionize their own category…
Definitely. Those solar panels are one, not straight. Two, floating.
Solarpunk is a sci-fi movement. Refusing to acknowledge a tech that is actually already there is the opposite of that.
I feel like you are misinterpreting my words here. Like I said, AI can be used well, and I’m all for ethical AI usage! Being mindful about how we use technology and what costs are implied by that use is what’s important.
And why are you assuming OP’s usage is unethical?
That’s pretty safe to assume, it’s OPs first post on this community and I’m unaware of any AI image models that don’t hammer a GPU.
GPU use automatically makes something unethical?
Well they use a lot of power compared to other components. Not saying the concept of GPUs is unethical.
It takes about 0.04 Wh on my machine to generate one image.
I think you are really over-reacting.
Sure you can apply the argument of it’s just one person, or one GPU or one car. But that’s not reality.
Millions of GPUs crunch numbers in datacenters to feed the AI consoomers. I see solarpunk as valuing principle over practicalties and a strong emphasis on taking responsibility. Therefore if this image was generated using a GPU demanding model, it contributes to that AI footprint. Therefore, it is not solarpunk.
Its ok if you disagree but i dont believe our ideals are obtainable without the help of ai.
Its true its not sustainable energy wise in current form but neither are devices most people use to access this sub.
I can also train and use stable diffusion models for as Much power as it takes me to run a modern video game and this movement will lose momentum quick if no more video games becomes a thing.
Instead focus your energy on the big tech companies that do so much more harm including unethical use of ai.