It's just the British museum all over again.

Can you elaborate on what you mean, for a layman?

Yeah. That is true.

All the data centers in the US combined use 4% of the electric load, and one of the main upsides to deepseek is that it requires much less energy to train (the main cost).

The energy use isn't that extreme. A forward pass on a 7B can be achieved on a Mac book.

If it's code and you RAG over some docs you could probably get away with a 4B tbh.

ML models use more energy than a simple model, however, not that much more.

The reason large companies are using so much energy is that they are using absolutely massive models to do everything so they can market a product. If individuals used the right model to solve the right problem (size, training, feed it with context etc. ) there would be no real issue.

It's important we don't conflate the excellent progress we've made with transformers over the last decade with an unregulated market, bad company practices and limited consumer Tech literacy.

TL;DR: LLM != search engine

You're right about this. I was commenting in the context of "intellectual property".

we’d still have to contend with the extreme energy use,

Meanwhile people running it on Raspberry PI: "I made it consume 1W less, which is 30% improvement!"

and the epistemic chaos of being able to generate convincing bullshit much quicker than it can be detected and flagged.

It's been this way long before modern AI.

The infosphere already turned to shit over 10 years ago when the internet started consolidating towards a few super large companies.

I am an artist & I agree, actually.

I do think it's problematic that corpos are using AI to replace working artists, although that's a systemic issue affecting a lot of disciplines.

That said, and I will get hate for this, there is a case to be made that if artists were more creative and interesting in general, they wouldn't be so easily displaced by AI slop.

Yes, even when people copy eachother they don't have the same output. And some individuals are mighty excentric, for instance Picasso. But most people stick almost entirely to what they see and only differentiate by means of the mistakes they make, not by intended originality. From the moment people are born they start copying everything they see. With a head full of mirror neurons we tend to live our lifes exactly the same, and the differences only stand out because they're relative. From a distance we would all look, behave, be more or less the same. Copyright should be abolished. I'm all in favor of supporting artists and creators, support whoever you will out of free will, but don't limit others freedom to copy you. If we can't copy what others have done before us, then our culture is not free. It should be an honor to be copied, that means others like your idea and want to use it too. That's how humans have always lived, that's how we progress. it's what has brought us this far. Let's continue without bizarre copying limitations. If we can copy freely that means culture is free, it means we can learn from eachother, take eachothers ideas and creations, put them to use and expand upon them, sometimes inadvertently while trying to make an exact copy. This freedom will be to the benefit of us all, and the opposite is true aswel, intelectual property is to the detriment of us all.

If you don't want your work to be used by others, keep it private. Don't show it to anyone. Keep your invention in your cellar and let nobody enter. If you want to share your ideas and creations, please do so. But you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't show what you've made and expect others to not use it as input and put it to use.