TACO BELLE

[Cirsium]

13. Calm?

I am not "calm" about theft and about environmental destruction, are you?

How I found out that an AI had stolen my art

So just out of curiosity I wanted to check if my art has been scraped from the web and used by Stable Diffusion. They graciously allow you to do that on haveibeentrained.com. Behind this site is a site called Spawning.ai, and they state in their Q&A that „copyright is an outdated system that is a bad fit for the AI era.“ They also state that „We believe that […] the artist community will benefit from this [AI] training to be consensual.“ Let me explain briefly why I shudder when I read this: As an artist, the intellectual property right is the most important right I have. If I can’t manage the rights to my art and decide who is allowed to do what with it, it becomes worthless. If everyone can just take it, how am I going to get paid?

I didn’t expect to find anything because my art isn’t like the digital AI art style that you see a lot from these image generators. I go field sketching, and create scientific illustrations, I’m not a very well known artist either. But I was curious. The search result was a surprise. The site found countless examples of my art, scraped directly from my website and from other places on the web. What I found really unsettling is that the algorithm grouped many of my pictures directly together – I’m not sure if it really does that based on my style or on alt tag or url properties – it was creepy moment.

https://juliabausenhardt.com/how-ai-is-stealing-your-art/

As Use of A.I. Soars, So Does the Energy and Water It Requires

Generative artificial intelligence uses massive amounts of energy for computation and data storage and millions of gallons of water to cool the equipment at data centers. Now, legislators and regulators — in the U.S. and the EU — are starting to demand accountability.

Two months after its release in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had 100 million active users, and suddenly tech corporations were racing to offer the public more “generative A.I.” Pundits compared the new technology’s impact to the Internet, or electrification, or the Industrial Revolution — or the discovery of fire.

Time will sort hype from reality, but one consequence of the explosion of artificial intelligence is clear: this technology’s environmental footprint is large and growing.

A.I. use is directly responsible for carbon emissions from non-renewable electricity and for the consumption of millions of gallons of fresh water, and it indirectly boosts impacts from building and maintaining the power-hungry equipment on which A.I. runs. As tech companies seek to embed high-intensity A.I. into everything from resume-writing to kidney transplant medicine and from choosing dog food to climate modeling, they cite many ways A.I. could help reduce humanity’s environmental footprint. But legislators, regulators, activists, and international organizations now want to make sure the benefits aren’t outweighed by A.I.’s mounting hazards.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/artificial-intelligence-climate-energy-emissions