cousin lobster

Ladders, 2017. 57" x 45". Machine pieced, machine quilted, cotton fabrics, cotton batting.

Sycamore. 1989. 74" x 52". Machine pieced, machine quilted, cotton fabrics, cotton batting.

what the FUCK was walking through my yard

this print is 2/3 the size of my size 8 footprint. the trail walked up to my tree, jackknifed to a pole it seemed to pass through, and continued on. the steps are very close together.

?????

There's this myth going around about generative AI consuming truly ridiculous amount of power and water. You'll see people say shit like "generating one image is like just pouring a whole cup of water out into the Sahara!" and bullshit like that, and it's just... not true. The actual truth is that supercomputers, which do a lot of stuff, use a lot of power, and at one point someone released an estimate of how much power some supercomputers were using and people went "oh, that supercomputer must only do AI! All generative AI uses this much power!" and then just... made shit up re: how making an image sucks up a huge chunk of the power grid or something. Which makes no sense because I'm given to understand that many of these models can run on your home computer. (I don't use them so I don't know the details, but I'm told by users that you can download them and generate images locally.) Using these models uses far less power than, say, online gaming. Or using Tumblr. But nobody ever talks about how evil those things are because of their power generation. I wonder why.

To be clear, I don't like generative AI. I'm sure it's got uses in research and stuff but on the consumer side, every effect I've seen of it is bad. Its implementation in products that I use has always made those products worse. The books it writes and flood the market with are incoherent nonsense at best and dangerous at worst (let's not forget that mushroom foraging guide). It's turned the usability of search engines from "rapidly declining, but still usable if you can get past the ads" into "almost one hundred per cent useless now, actually not worth the effort to de-bullshittify your search results", especially if you're looking for images. It's a tool for doing bullshit that people were already doing much easier and faster, thus massively increasing the amount of bullshit. The only consumer-useful uses I've seen of it as a consumer are niche art projects, usually projects that explore the limits of the tool itself like that one poetry book or the Infinite Art Machine; overall I'd say its impact at the Casual Random Person (me) level has been overwhelmingly negative. Also, the fact that so much AI turns out to be underpaid people in a warehouse in some country with no minimum wage and terrible labour protections is... not great. And the fact that it's often used as an excuse to try to find ways to underpay professionals ("you don't have to write it, just clean up what the AI came up with!") is also not great.

I don't have any hard evidence for this but experiences I've had, and people close to me have had, about others using AI worries me

My friend was in a group for a particular profession (not naming it because of privacy) but it's one where you are basically a small time independent person who has to market yourself. Like a hairdresser, plumber, free-lance accountant etc. Its important to say that this particular business relies on the personality and approachability of the person in question as a selling point.

And a person was using generative AI to create their social media bios for their business and asking for AI suggestions to make her logo.

This is a business where she is the product and she needs to sell herself and highlight her capabilities...and she's relying on AI. There is also the question of why couldn't she have asked any of the people in the group who had made their own logo to help her make her own.

Even more worrying was the time I got into a debate on here and the person I was debating with said "let's chatGPT this" which apparently meant they would input my response to chatGPT and ask it to make a response and then I was excepted to do the same with their response.

I politely refused and just actually came up with my own response but they used chatGPT

In a debate.

Now to give that person credit they did actually read my responses and think about them and left the conversation open minded but I cannot stop thinking how dystopian it is for two people to be "debating" back and forth without actually sharing their actual thoughts. Because they outsourced it to a machine

And the person in question proposed it like it was a common thing I should know about. And the terrifies me.

But again, this is all anecdotal and not actual hard evidence of this being a bit issue. But it scares me

Let's not forget that one lawyer who got in trouble when the bot hallucinated a fake case to support his argument and he took it at its word (instead of doing his fucking job). A funny story in isolation, but only because everyone else in the trial was on the ball.

No, the unpaid old version of Chat GPT that you can run from a browser isn’t using a cup of water with every click. But the newest version of it being trained in-house, using enormous warehouses full of screaming hot servers IS.

Tech giants use potable water to cool their servers, meaning clean drinking water is being straight up removed from the potable water cycle. Google’s warehouses in Arizona had to switch to (much less effective) air-based cooling systems because the state had a drinking water shortage. Tech giants claim they have water stewardship programs in place and want to be ‘net zero’ but it’s clear they don’t have real plans. Encouraging responsible water use is all well and good, but it doesn’t put the clean water they removed back into the system.

How much of a danger you consider AI to be or not be is your personal choice, but at least let’s be honest about it. It’s really easy to find info about AI-specific concerns when it comes to water, it’s not just ‘hysterical bullshit.’