In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
First of all it concentrates power and wealth on the owners of the models (Microsoft, OpenAI) or the ones that provide the tools (Nvidia).
Yes, there is truth in it, that people who couldn't afford to pay someone to create art, or get consulting, can get this now to a certain extend (if they can afford internet access and pay the AI services they need). But this comes also at the price of lowering the income of the people who provided these services. They now need to compete in the business creation market and not in the market that they trained for. Not everyone can create and maintain a business with or without starting money, just from a skill point of view. Nor does everybody want to.
The concentration of power part is not true unless people keep trying to use copyrights and the legal system to protect themselves from genai, at which point it will be true. Currently there's plenty of self hosted solutions like stable diffusion and services like the ai horde to help even people without gpu for free
So your gonna solder your own video cards?
In theory sure, but in practice it’s just gonna give more control to MS and NVidia since they are the ones most people would use.
People buy GPUs already for video games and other purposes. We're using the same consumer cards, not enterprise ones.
That still involves you giving lots of money to card manufacturers. Which is rather centralized atm (not many competitors).
You give money to centralized monopolistic capitalists regardless what you do
Not when I’m creating art by hand.
Sure I’m paying for a pencil and paper, but you don’t need massive investment into means of production to create that.
That’s why the Industrial Revolution changed things, you now need big factories for your critical tools.
... now that's a silly take. A nearly $300 billion industry.
Paper creation is one of the worst sources of pollution and water drains on the planet. Far, far, far more than anything dealing with AI lol. Orders of magnitude higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_and_paper_industry
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1073451/global-market-value-pulp-and-paper/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_paper
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468584419300479
Writing instruments are a $17 billion industry... Get off the internet for a bit. Doomerism is getting to you.
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/writing-instruments-market