On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“Listen, generative LLMs and art imaging tools will get better and better over time. If your opposition is based on crappy outputs, that problem will get solved.
Problems such as unsustainable resource consumption, unfair labour practices, accelerating wealth inequity and the absolute death of joyful creativity, however, will not be fixed.” —@barsoomcore
Using GPT-4 to generate 100 words consumes up to 3 bottles of water — AI data centers also raise power and water bills for nearby residents
The electric cost of GPT-4 is also quite high. If one out of 10 working Americans use GPT-4 once a week for a year (so, 52 queries total by 17 million people), the corresponding power demands of 121,517 MWh would be equal to the electricity consumed by every single household in Washington D.C. (an estimated 671,803 people) for twenty days. That’s nothing to scoff at, especially since it’s an unrealistically light use case for GPT-4’s target audience.
The Subprime AI Crisis
I am deeply concerned that this entire industry is built on sand. Large Language Models at the scale of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Llama are unsustainable, and do not appear to have a path to profitability due to the compute-intensive nature of generative AI. Training them necessitates spending hundreds of millions — if not billions — of dollars, and requires such a large amount of training data that these companies have effectively stolen from millions of artists and writers and hoped they’d get away with it.
The Carbon Tax Is Good for Canadians. Why Axe It?
Wise leadership matters—leadership guided by history, science, economic experience, and example. Now more than ever, Canadians need to be reminded of that. Families in Canada sacrifice by paying a carbon tax, but they are rewarded when they get much of their outlay—or more—back while directly contributing to climatic responsibility. That contribution is an outcome worth celebrating.
How the Apricot Tree Café became a leader in clean indoor air
The Toronto-area eatery invested in improved ventilation before reopening after stay-at-home orders. Their business is better than ever, proof that paying attention to indoor air quality is vital during an ongoing pandemic …
Since improving the café’s air quality, neither he [Franz Hochholdinger ] nor Esther has been sick despite often working 14-15 hours a day. And at a time when Restaurants Canada, a nonprofit that advocates for the restaurant industry, estimates that 62% of the nation’s restaurants are losing money or breaking even, the café’s profits continue to grow. Hochholdinger said that they had their best year on record in 2023 and are up 20% in revenue so far this year. Customers from as far away as New York City and Los Angeles have come to the café for its clean air, according to the guest book.
The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters — Ursula K. Le Guin (2014)
Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
