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.
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.
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.
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.
