The thing is that image generators aren’t even such big environmental hazards. They are often comparable to other activities like gaming, since you can often run them locally. At scale that’s also a bad thing to have, but we don’t get people up in arms about many equivalent things.
It’s the biggest LLMs that are extraordinarily inefficient, since you need entire compute clusters to get those running. There’s just not really a way to put every AI tech into the same box except by not caring about the truth, so it makes the people that don’t draw that nuance look very scummy to people aware of that nuance.
The thing is that image generators aren’t even such big environmental hazards. They are often comparable to other activities like gaming, since you can often run them locally. At scale that’s also a bad thing to have, but we don’t get people up in arms about many equivalent things.
It’s the biggest LLMs that are extraordinarily inefficient, since you need entire compute clusters to get those running. There’s just not really a way to put every AI tech into the same box except by not caring about the truth, so it makes the people that don’t draw that nuance look very scummy to people aware of that nuance.