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I'm not 100% down with these numbers. The verge has a breakdown of energy usage for generation and training, and you could argue that demand is responsible for training.
I would also argue that energy usage would be directly related to water usage. Unless there is passive cooling unrelated to the energy generation, the evaporation would be directly related to the energy cost.
I didn't collect sources while I was coming this, but I found that it takes about .3 KWH to generate an AI image - about the same as fully charging a smartphone. 1kwh is ~860 kCal (one Calorie = kCal = 1000 calories) 1 image is ~282 Calories 1 Calorie heats 1 liter of water 1 degree It takes ~540 Calories to vaporise 1 liter 2 images vaporize a liter of water There are ~30k liters in an 18 foot above ground pool with 4ft of water. There were 15 billion images generated daily in May 2024 As of August 2023, people have generated almost 15.5 billion AI-generated images, and each day sees approximately 34 million new AI-generated images. 17 million liters vaporized daily, about 500 swimming pools This put my numbers at ~250k swimming pools vaporized so far.
There isn't really set power usage per image, since different models will take different amount of time. There are 100s of different factors and optional toggles that can increase or reduce time needed.
I was using a pretty broad brush. Some of the figures were higher, some were lower, but it many were consistently around .3. Feel free to take it with a grain of salt. Even if I'm over by 50%, it is still a large number.
my GPU can use 80 watts max and it takes 10 seconds to produce an image, that's about 0.00022kwh, which is 1300 times less than what you said.
This may be rude, but we talked about this elsewhere in this thread.
oh, I thought you were a different person lol. 😭
it takes about 10 seconds for me to generate an image, my GPU can use 80 watts max. that's 800 watt seconds or 0.0002222 kWh, if my math is correct
That's a good point. I'm guessing my numbers might refer more to cloud providers than individuals with smaller data sets.
yea, i feel like theres a lot of misinformation around ai, both from ai bros and ai haters. im definitely not a fan of big corporations stealing the work of small artists, but it seems like most places have just become an ai hate circlejerk