You can certainly try to use the power as much as possible, or sell the energy to a country with a deficit. But the problem is that you would still need to invest a lot of money to make sure the grid can handle the excess if you build renewables to cover 100% of the grid demand for now and in the future. Centralized fuel sources require much less grid changes because it flows from one place and spreads from there, so infrastructure only needs to be improved close to the source. Renewables as decentralized power sources requires the grid to be strengthened anywhere they are placed, and often that is not practical, both in financial costs and in the engineers it takes to actually do that.

Would it be preferable? Yes. Would it happen before we already need to be fully carbon neutral? Often not.

I’d refer you to my other post about the situation in my country. We have a small warehouse of a few football fields which stores the highest radioactivity of unusable nuclear fuel, and still has more than enough space for centuries. The rest of the fuel is simply re-used until it’s effectively regular waste. The time to build two new nuclear reactors here also costs only about 10 years, not 20.

Rather continue with wind and solar and then batteries for the money.

All of these things should happen regardless of nuclear progress. And they do happen. But again, building renewables isn’t just about the price.

Some personal thoughts: My own country (The Netherlands) has despite a very vocal anti-nuclear movement in the 20th century completely flipped now to where the only parties not in favor of Nuclear are the Greens, who at times quote the fear as a reason not to do it. As someone who treats climate change as truly existential for our country that lies below projected sea levels, it makes them look unreasonable and not taking the issue seriously. We have limited land too, and a housing crisis on top of it. So land usage is a big pain point for renewables, and even if the land is unused, it is often so close to civilization that it does affect people’s feelings of their surroundings when living near them, which might cause renewables to not make it as far as it could unrestricted. A nuclear reactor takes up fractions of the space, and can be relatively hidden from people.

All the other parties who heavily lean in to combating climate change at least acknowledge nuclear as an option that should (and are) being explored. And even the more climate skeptical parties see nuclear as something they could stand behind. Having broad support for certain actions is also important to actually getting things done. Our two new nuclear powered plants are expected to be running by 2035. Only ten years from now, ahead of our climate goals to be net-zero in 2040.

People are kind of missing the point of the meme. The point is that Nuclear is down there along with renewables in safety and efficiency. It’s lacking the egregious cover up in the original meme, even if it has legitimate concerns now. And due to society’s ever increasing demand for electricity, we will heavily benefit from having a more scalable solution that doesn’t require covering and potentially disrupting massive amounts of land before their operations can be scaled up to meet extraordinary demand. Wind turbines and solar panels don’t stop working when we can’t use their electricity either, so it’s not like we can build too many of them or we risk creating complications out of peak hours. Many electrical networks aren’t built to handle the loads. A nuclear reactor can be scaled down to use less fuel and put less strain on the electrical network when unneeded.

It should also be said that money can’t always be spent equally everywhere. And depending on the labor required, there is also a limit to how manageable infrastructure is when it scales. The people that maintain and build solar panels, hydro, wind turbines, and nuclear, are not the same people. And if we acknowledge that climate change is an existential crisis, we must put our eggs in every basket we can, to diversify the energy transition. All four of the safest and most efficient solutions we have should be tapped into. But nuclear is often skipped because of outdated conceptions and fear. It does cost a lot and takes a while to build, but it fits certain shapes in the puzzle that none of the others do as well as it does.

Depends on where you live I suppose. Irrational AI hate is something I only really encounter online. Then again my country has pretty good worker protections, so there’s less reason to be afraid of AI.

I like to think it being able to do this is a feature. Imagination beyond our own.

Lets be real - This isn’t going to change on it’s own. The only way for it to change is if everyone collectively took a stand against it. Which simply just won’t happen. The most reasonable thing to do is to focus your energy on collectives that actively reject such practices. Oh hey, you’re already in one: Lemmy, good job. As long as we work together to create a small corner of the internet that remains true to what the internet should be, we can grow it and create a better internet in the long term.

Awesome and great explanation for a layperson. Because the industry has been faking lighting for so long and lighting is quite important, the industry has become incredibly good at it. But it also takes a lot of development time that could be spent on adding more content or features. There’s a reason the opinion about ray tracing is extremely positive within the game development industry. But also nobody’s expecting it to become the norm over night, and the period with hybrid support for both raytracing and legacy lighting is only just starting.

First: They did actually end up removing this and making it configurable, check the bottom of the page. In a vacuum, the idea to stop cut-and-clear racists and trolls from using Lemmy is not something that’s too controversial. Sure, they are being hard asses about changing their mind and allowing instance owners to configure it themselves (and I’m glad they changed their mind). But there’s a big overlap between passionate and opinionated people, so they have to be at times to ensure a project doesn’t devolve into something they can’t put your passion into anymore.

Second: I mean… what do you expect? In the issue above they actively encourage people to make their own fork of Lemmy and run that if they don’t like something from the base version of Lemmy, so I kind of would assume they do as they preach. Instance owners also have the option to block communities without defederation. Lemmy.ml is basically their home instance. If anything this is a reason not to make an account on lemmy.ml, but as long as that doesn’t leak into the source code of Lemmy, who cares?

It’s because the current version has nothing wrong with it. If the Lemmy devs should choose to sabotage the Lemmy software, you’d be surprised how easily that happens when it pisses off all the instances and their owners. Instances will simply refuse to upgrade. And like most things, eventually some fork will win the race to become the dominant fork and the current Lemmy devs would be essentially disowned. Different forks also doesn’t necessarily mean API breaking changes, so different forks would have no issue communicating (at least for a while).

The fact they are not people does not mean they can’t use the same legal justifications that humans use. The law can’t think ahead. The justification is rather simple, the output is transformative. Humans are allowed to be inspired by other works because the ideas that make up such a concept can’t be copyrighted because they can be applied to be transformative. If the human uses that idea to produce something that’s not transformative, it’s also infringement. AI currently falls into that same reasoning.

You call it a self serving lie, but I could easily say that about your arguments as well that you only have this opinion because you don’t like AI (it seems). That’s not constructive, and since I hope you care about artists as well, I implore you actually engage in good faith debate other than just assuming the other person must be lying because they don’t share your opinion. You are also forgetting that the people that benefit from image generators are people. They are artists too. Most from before AI was a thing, and some because it became a thing.

Again, sorry to hear your husband feels that way. I feel he is doing himself a disservice to dismiss a new technology, as history has not been kind to those who oppose inevitable change, especially when it there are no good non-emotional reasons against this new technology. Most companies have never cared about artists, that fact was true without AI, and that fact will remain true whatever happens. But if they replace their artists with AI they are fools, because the technology isn’t that great on it’s own (currently). You need human intervention to use AI to make high quality output, it’s a tool, not the entire process.

The Hollywood strikes is a good example of what artists should be doing rather than making certain false claims online. Join a union, get protection for your craft. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean you can’t fight for your right to demand specific protections from your employer. But they do not affect laws, they are organizational. It has no ramifications on people not part of the guilds involved. If a company which while protecting their artists, allows them to use AI to accelerate their workflow, and comes out on top against the company that despite their best intentions, made their art department not as profitable anymore, that will also cause them to lose their jobs. Since AI is very likely not to go away completely even in the most optimistic of scenarios, it’s eventually a worse situation than before.

And lastly, I guess your husband does different work than the digital artists I work with then. You have a ton of generation tools for meshes and textures. I also never equated it directly to AI, but you stated that they use no tools which do all the work for them (such as building a mesh for them), which is false. You wouldn’t use the direct output of AI as well. I implore you to look at “algorithmic art”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_art

That’s true, but the reason behind that is reasonable. There has been no human intervention, and so like photos taken by animals, they hold no copyright. But that’s not what you should be doing anyways, a tool must be used as part of a process, not as *the process*.

The inverse is also true. Disney will make their own AI regardless of being able to use anyone else’s data for training. Because they have a ton of data already. The only ones that will be shafted if that freedom is restricted is that those without a library of data to train will have no access to AI.

Hence why it’s important that open source models should keep the support of the public. If they have to close shop, what remains will be those made by tech giants. They will be censored, they will be neutered, except if you pay enough for them. The power should remain with the artists, and not those with the money.

Care to point to those Ls in court? Because as far as I’m aware they are mostly still ongoing and no legal consensus has been established.

It’s also a bit disingenuous to boil his argument down to what you did, as that’s obviously not what he said. You would most likely agree that a human would produce transformative works even when basing most of their knowledge on that of another (such as tracing).

Ideas are not copyrightable, and neither are styles. You could use that understanding of another’s work to create forgeries of their work, but hence why there exist protections against forgeries. But just making something in the style of another does not constitute infringement.

EDIT:

This was pretty much the only update on a currently running lawsuit I could find: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-judge-finds-flaws-artists-lawsuit-against-ai-companies-2023-07-19/

“U.S. District Judge William Orrick said during a hearing in San Francisco on Wednesday that he was inclined to dismiss most of a lawsuit brought by a group of artists against generative artificial intelligence companies, though he would allow them to file a new complaint.”

"The judge also said the artists were unlikely to succeed on their claim that images generated by the systems based on text prompts using their names violated their copyrights.

“I don’t think the claim regarding output images is plausible at the moment, because there’s no substantial similarity” between images created by the artists and the AI systems, Orrick said."

Hard to call that an L, so I’m eagerly awaiting them.

Those 10000 tabletop RPGs will almost certainly be completely worthless on their own, but might contain some novel ideas. Until a human comes by and scours it for ideas and combines it. It could very well be that in the same time it could only create 1 coherent tabletop RPG idea.

Should be mentioned though, AIs don’t run for free either, they cost quite a lot of electricity and require expensive hardware.

Except they totally could. But a data source of such size of material where everyone opted in to use for AI explicitly does not exist. The reason they fight it is in part also because training such models isn’t exactly free. The hardware that it’s done on costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and must run for long periods. You would not just do that for the funsies unless you have to. And considering the data by all means seems to be collected in legal ways, they have cause to fight such cases.

It’s a bit weird to use that as an argument to begin with since a party that knows they are at fault usually settles rather than fight on and incur more costs. It’s almost as if they don’t agree with your assertion that they needed permission, and that those imagines were IP violating 🤔

First of all, your second point is very sad to hear, but also a non-factor. You are aware people stole artwork before the advent of AI right? This has always been a problem with capitalism. It’s very hard to get accountability unless you are some big shot with easy access to a lawyer at your disposal. It’s always been shafting artists and those who do a lot of hard work.

I agree that artists deserve better and should gain more protections, but the unfortunate truth is that the wrong kind of response to AI could shaft them even more. Lets say inspiration could in some cases be ruled to be copyright infringement if the source of the inspiration could be reasonably traced back to another work. This could allow companies big companies like Disney an easier pathway to sue people for copyright infringement, after all your mind is forever tainted in their IP after you’ve watched a single Disney movie. Banning open source models from existing could also create a situation where the same big companies could create internal AI models from the art in their possession, but anyone with not enough materials could not. Which would mean that everyone but the people already taking advantage of artists will benefit from the existence of the technology.

I get that you want to speak up for your friends and family, and perhaps they do different work than I imagine, but do you actually talk to them about what they do in their work? Because digital artist also use non-AI algorithms to generate meshes and images. (And yes, that could be summed down to ‘type shit in and a 3D model appears’) They also use building blocks, prefabs, and use reference assets to create new unique assets. And like all artists they do take (sometimes direct) inspiration from the ideas of others, as does the rest of humanity. Some of the digital artists I know have embraced the technology and combined it with the rest of their skills to create new works more efficiently and reduce their workload. Either by being able to produce more, or being able to spend more time refining works. It’s just a tool that has made their life easier.

And this, is a strawman. If this argument is being made, it’s most likely because of their own misunderstanding of the subject. They are most likely trying to make the argument that the way biological neural networks and artificial neural networks ‘learn’ is similar. Which is true to a certain extent since one is derived from the other. There’s a legitimate argument to be made that this inherently provides transformation, and it’s exceptionally easy to see that in most unguided prompts.

I haven’t seen your version of this argument being spoken around here at all. In fact it feels like a personal interpretation of someone who did not understand what someone else was trying to communicate to them. A shame to imply that’s an argument people are regularly making.

Halfway-North American

That makes a lot of sense then yes