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Is AWAY using it's own program or is this just a voluntary list of guidelines for people using programs like DALL-E? How does AWAY address the environmental concerns of how the companies making those AI programs conduct themselves (energy consumption, exploiting impoverished areas for cheap electricity, destruction of the environment to rapidly build and get the components for data centers etc.)? Are members of AWAY encouraged to contact their gov representatives about IP theft by AI apps?

What is AWAY and how does it work?

AWAY does not "use its own program" in the software sense—rather, we're a diverse collective of ~1000 members that each have their own varying workflows and approaches to art. While some members do use AI as one tool among many, most of the people in the server are actually traditional artists who don't use AI at all, yet are still interested in ethical approaches to new technologies.

Our code of ethics is a set of voluntary guidelines that members agree to follow upon joining. These emphasize ethical AI approaches, (preferably open-source models that can run locally), respecting artists who oppose AI by not training styles on their art, and refusing to use AI to undercut other artists or work for corporations that similarly exploit creative labor.

Environmental Impact in Context

It's important to place environmental concerns about AI in the context of our broader extractive, industrialized society, where there are virtually no "clean" solutions:

The water usage figures for AI data centers (200-740 million liters annually) represent roughly 0.00013% of total U.S. water usage. This is a small fraction compared to industrial agriculture or manufacturing—for example, golf course irrigation alone in the U.S. consumes approximately 2.08 billion gallons of water per day, or about 7.87 trillion liters annually. This makes AI's water usage about 0.01% of just golf course irrigation.

Looking into individual usage, the average American consumes about 26.8 kg of beef annually, which takes around 1,608 megajoules (MJ) of energy to produce. Making 10 ChatGPT queries daily for an entire year (3,650 queries) consumes just 38.1 MJ—about 42 times less energy than eating beef. In fact, a single quarter-pound beef patty takes 651 times more energy to produce than a single AI query.

Overall, power usage specific to AI represents just 4% of total data center power consumption, which itself is a small fraction of global energy usage. Current annual energy usage for data centers is roughly 9-15 TWh globally—comparable to producing a relatively small number of vehicles.

The consumer environmentalism narrative around technology often ignores how imperial exploitation pushes environmental costs onto the Global South. The rare earth minerals needed for computing hardware, the cheap labor for manufacturing, and the toxic waste from electronics disposal disproportionately burden developing nations, while the benefits flow largely to wealthy countries.

While this pattern isn't unique to AI, it is fundamental to our global economic structure. The focus on individual consumer choices (like whether or not one should use AI, for art or otherwise,) distracts from the much larger systemic issues of imperialism, extractive capitalism, and global inequality that drive environmental degradation at a massive scale.

They are not going to stop building the data centers, and they weren't going to even if AI never got invented.

Creative Tools and Environmental Impact

In actuality, all creative practices have some sort of environmental impact in an industrialized society:

Digital art software (such as Photoshop, Blender, etc) generally uses 60-300 watts per hour depending on your computer's specifications. This is typically more energy than dozens, if not hundreds, of AI image generations (maybe even thousands if you are using a particularly low-quality one).

Traditional art supplies rely on similar if not worse scales of resource extraction, chemical processing, and global supply chains, all of which come with their own environmental impact.

Paint production requires roughly thirteen gallons of water to manufacture one gallon of paint.

Many oil paints contain toxic heavy metals and solvents, which have the potential to contaminate ground water.

Synthetic brushes are made from petroleum-based plastics that take centuries to decompose.

That being said, the point of this section isn't to deflect criticism of AI by criticizing other art forms. Rather, it's important to recognize that we live in a society where virtually all artistic avenues have environmental costs. Focusing exclusively on the newest technologies while ignoring the environmental costs of pre-existing tools and practices doesn't help to solve any of the issues with our current or future waste.

The largest environmental problems come not from individual creative choices, but rather from industrial-scale systems, such as:

Industrial manufacturing (responsible for roughly 22% of global emissions)

Industrial agriculture (responsible for roughly 24% of global emissions)

Transportation and logistics networks (responsible for roughly 14% of global emissions)

Making changes on an individual scale, while meaningful on a personal level, can't address systemic issues without broader policy changes and overall restructuring of global economic systems.

Intellectual Property Considerations

AWAY doesn't encourage members to contact government representatives about "IP theft" for multiple reasons:

We acknowledge that copyright law overwhelmingly serves corporate interests rather than individual creators

Creating new "learning rights" or "style rights" would further empower large corporations while harming individual artists and fan creators

Many AWAY members live outside the United States, many of which having been directly damaged by the US, and thus understand that intellectual property regimes are often tools of imperial control that benefit wealthy nations

Instead, we emphasize respect for artists who are protective of their work and style. Our guidelines explicitly prohibit imitating the style of artists who have voiced their distaste for AI, working on an opt-in model that encourages traditional artists to give and subsequently revoke permissions if they see fit. This approach is about respect, not legal enforcement. We are not a pro-copyright group.

In Conclusion

AWAY aims to cultivate thoughtful, ethical engagement with new technologies, while also holding respect for creative communities outside of itself. As a collective, we recognize that real environmental solutions require addressing concepts such as imperial exploitation, extractive capitalism, and corporate power—not just focusing on individual consumer choices, which do little to change the current state of the world we live in.

When discussing environmental impacts, it's important to keep perspective on a relative scale, and to avoid ignoring major issues in favor of smaller ones. We promote balanced discussions based in concrete fact, with the belief that they can lead to meaningful solutions, rather than misplaced outrage that ultimately serves to maintain the status quo.

If this resonates with you, please feel free to join our discord. :)

Works Cited:

USGS Water Use Data: https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/water-use-united-states

Golf Course Superintendents Association of America water usage report: https://www.gcsaa.org/resources/research/golf-course-environmental-profile

Equinix data center water sustainability report: https://www.equinix.com/resources/infopapers/corporate-sustainability-report

Environmental Working Group's Meat Eater's Guide (beef energy calculations): https://www.ewg.org/meateatersguide/

Hugging Face AI energy consumption study: https://huggingface.co/blog/carbon-footprint

International Energy Agency report on data centers: https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks

Goldman Sachs "Generational Growth" report on AI power demand: https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/gs-research/generational-growth-ai-data-centers-and-the-coming-us-power-surge/report.pdf

Artists Network's guide to eco-friendly art practices: https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-business/how-to-be-an-eco-friendly-artist/

The Earth Chronicles' analysis of art materials: https://earthchronicles.org/artists-ironically-paint-nature-with-harmful-materials/

Natural Earth Paint's environmental impact report: https://naturalearthpaint.com/pages/environmental-impact

Our World in Data's global emissions by sector: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

"The High Cost of High Tech" report on electronics manufacturing: https://goodelectronics.org/the-high-cost-of-high-tech/

"Unearthing the Dirty Secrets of the Clean Energy Transition" (on rare earth mineral mining): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/18/clean-energy-dirty-mining-indigenous-communities-climate-crisis

Electronic Frontier Foundation's position paper on AI and copyright: https://www.eff.org/wp/ai-and-copyright

Creative Commons research on enabling better sharing: https://creativecommons.org/2023/04/24/ai-and-creativity/

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re:vanishment (aka i finished 7th dragon code vfd and feel emo about it)

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"drawing of three figures at table in a cave setting with four woman standing near the table"

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"a person is walking in a forest with trees on either side"

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"an image of a painting in red and blue tones,"

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Monster Hunter is great because most of the time, there's at least a pseudoscientific explanation for how this monkey can breathe fire. And then there's the Elder Dragons. Even the scientists in the Monster Hunter world are like "we have no idea what this is or how it functions." Imagine if real animals were like that.

"Ah yes, this is the Giant Anteater. It has large powerful claws and a long flexible tongue to assist it in hunting ants and termites. And this is the Orbital Deathdrake; it summons meteors sometimes and we're still not sure why or how."

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walpurgisnacht

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Does it bother you that LLMs are huge money losers so that AI companies are making billions in losses and will eventually shut down once the investment hype dies down?

Why would that bother me? I use open source. I don’t care about what AI companies do in this regard.

I hope this wasn’t supposed to be some sort of own.

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posted on behalf of an AWAY member who wishes to remain anonymous

"I'm starting to thing that openai is trying to censor some styles and characters/celebrities"

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do you think your thesis on Ender's various games impacts your reading the siblings sideplot? or are they representing something entirely different?

I talked about this a little in a response to a response to the essay (it's in the reblogs), but Peter and Valentine's plot is a foil to Ender's. Peter and Valentine were rejected by the military's game of control, and being outside it are capable of, essentially, taking over the world, even as children. On the face of it, it's a ridiculous plotline, but in the world of Ender's Game, it's to be expected; the Wiggin children are preternatural geniuses and they do not lose. The juxtaposition between Ender and Peter is especially highlighted at the end of the story, when Valentine and Ender remark how ironic it is that the sadistic Peter saved millions of lives by bringing about peace accords, while Ender killed billions by following orders. I suppose you can interpret the subplot two ways in terms of Ender's culpability: Either it shows that Ender was, in fact, intelligent enough to take over the broader system of control if he wanted to, or it shows that it was specifically the military's control over him, the distracting games they sent his way where he could win and conquer and not question the larger game, that prevented Ender from achieving something actually good.

Another interesting note is that the military rejected Peter because he was too cruel. This detail is given very early on, but when revisited in retrospect while considering what exactly the military wanted Ender to do (namely, complete and utter genocide without mercy), it's odd that Peter's cruelty was seen as grounds for disqualification at all. The military doesn't even care that Ender kills a few other kids on his way to the top; actually, they encourage it by putting him in a situation with Bonzo where he is forced to resort to violence. Ender comments on this throughout the story himself: They want me to be Peter, he thinks, they're trying to make me be Peter, I really am Peter after all (he sees Peter in the mirror in the psychology game).

The military brass and Rackham mention that Ender's empathy in understanding the buggers was essential to his ability to destroy them, which is true, but Peter also displays the ability to understand his adversaries during his blogging rise to global control -- his entire plot hinges on Locke and Demosthenes manipulating public opinion exactly the way he wants, and it works. Perhaps we can take this explanation at face value, assume Ender's superior empathy to Peter was in fact necessary to his success, but there's another interpretation I like, which is that Ender's compassion makes him easier to control. Both times Ender puts up any resistance to the system of control, not by active dissent but by simply shutting down, the military whips him back into compliance by parading Valentine in front of him, as if to say "Look who you have to save. You have to do what we say to save her." Is Peter's sociopathic cruelty really disqualifying him from beating the buggers, or does it just make him harder for the military to control?

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There's probably something to dig into about how 90% of the backlash to the the new 'studio ghiblify your photos' thing chatGPT can do treats the entire artistic and creative output of the studio as being synonymous with and the moral property of one specific guy.

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I’m not naming names because I’m not trying to start anything but I’m seeing several mutuals claiming they always knew Gaiman was a bad egg and it was so obvious, as though they didn’t make me stand in line with them to get his signature and kept their signed copies of his books on a special shelf akin to a shrine.

And like, listen, you don’t need to pretend.

This isn’t the devil’s sacrament. You’re not tainted by association. You’re not morally bad for not immediately knowing when someone is being charming and persuasive to hide something they don’t want you to know.

Abusers don’t just groom their victims. They groom their witnesses too. You were never supposed to know something was wrong because it was intentionally hidden. It’s okay you didn’t know. You don’t need to act like you never liked him or his work. You don’t need to pretend. But you do need to stop being shitty to other people who also didn’t know because it reeks of victim blaming.

“Well I knew, so how come others didn’t?”

His victims were fans. Are you blaming them for not knowing?

Christ alive, I hope not.