[_heimdall]

Food may be a bit of an outlier, the number of consumers won't change quickly in response and each person can only eat so much.

When it comes to converting electricity into images and text, there really is no upper bound in sight. People are happy to load the internet up with as much content as they can churn out.

[wongarsu]

If we assume that text and images are made for human consumption then there is a limit in how much we can consume. In fact I doubt there is much room for our society's per-person media consumption to increase. There is obviously room for growth in fewer people seeing the same content, and room for some "waste" (i.e. content nobody ever sees). The upper bound (ignoring waste) would be if everybody only saw and read content that nobody else has ever seen and will ever see. But if we assume society continues to function as it does the real limit will be a lot lower.

Now maybe waste is a bigger issue with content than with food. I'm not sure. Both have some nonzero cost to waste. It might depend on how content is distributed

[ben_w]

Mm.

I'd would say that text is capable of being extremely useful even when no human reads it, because of source code, maths proofs, etc.

But I'm curious: 238 wpm * 0.75 words per token * 16 (waking) hours per day * 83 years * $10.00 / 1M output tokens (current API cost for 4o without batching) means the current cost of making as many tokens as a human can read in a lifetime is $92,300: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=238+words+per+minute+%2...

With these numbers, a well-written project with even a billion lines of code would be a rounding error even if only a thousand people used any specific such software and none of that was ever shared with what other people wanted to get done.

[_heimdall]

Its an interesting question for sure. Anecdotally it seems to me like there's a ton of content thrown online that is rarely, if ever, consumed. From bot-generated blog posts to social media posts, surely some of it is never seen or viewed only a few times before it gets buried and never seen again.

Market dynamics should push people to stop generating that content if they don't enough value to justify the cost. In practice, though, it hasn't seemed to happen yet and we must be pass a threshold where there's more content created online than we could ever value.

It'd make for an interesting study, but short of having verifiable data I have to assume we'll continue increasing the rate at which content is created whether the value is there or not.

[UltraSane]

Yandex image search works really well at finding similar images but it also leads you to some very strange parts of the internet that are exactly what you are describing: bot generated pages that almost no one reads.

[HappMacDonald]

The simplest example of what you describe regarding fully bespoke content would be realtime generation of VR feeds. Of course even in VR people would be consuming still more 2D content: the environments are built out of 3d models textured by 2d content at higher resolutions than most viewers will ever closely inspect.

You'd most likely categorize all of the unseen textures or higher-than-needed resolution in your "waste" bucket, and I can't argue with that. But VR still clearly means that there is at least theoretical room for "realtime video generated custom for every viewer, which in turn is composed of even more content sources".

[ben_w]

You don't see an end at the level of everyone having it at 60fps (or so) in each eye?

[_heimdall]

I'm not quite sure what you mean, 60fps would have something to do with output displays but nothing to do with the content. There's no upper bound to how much content people would have LLMs make, whether that content is being consumed on cell phone screens or some kind of in-eye display.

[ben_w]

If you generate a new image 60 times per second, that's reasonably described as "60 fps", this is how the output of video game engines has been described for at least 25 years*.

If everyone's doing that all day every day on each eye, that's a reasonable guess of an upper bound: you as a human cannot actually consume more even if you make it.

GANs can already do that speed, but any given GAN is a specialist AI and not a general model; diffusion models are general, but they're slower (best generation speed I've seen is 4-5 frames per second on unknown hardware). LLMs aren't really suited to doing images at all, but can control other models (this is what ChatGPT does when "it makes an image" — it calls out to DALL•E).

* how long I've been paying attention to that, not a detailed historical analysis

[_heimdall]

Sure, I supposed you could calculate a limit by looking at how many human eyes there are, how many frames per second they can see, and max resolution visible. That still isn't actually a limit on how many images could be made, only how many could be consumed.

That said, if we got to such a massive scale I'd expect us to hit other limits first (electricity available, best produced, storage space, network transmission, etc.).

Or did I totally misunderstand your example here? I may have misread it completely, if so sorry about that!

[ben_w]

> Sure, I supposed you could calculate a limit by looking at how many human eyes there are, how many frames per second they can see, and max resolution visible. That still isn't actually a limit on how many images could be made, only how many could be consumed.

Sure, absolutely. But I can say the same of food, which is why I drew the analogy between them previously.

> That said, if we got to such a massive scale I'd expect us to hit other limits first (electricity available, best produced, storage space, network transmission, etc.).

Difficult to guess when the quality isn't yet at the right threshold: GANs are already this speed on phone hardware*, so we're not bounded on that specific combination with available electrical energy; on the other hand, 2 years ago I was seeing images for about 3 kJ, which is in the region of hundreds of kilowatts for 2 eyes at 60 fps, which is absolutely going to be a problem… if they were limited to that hardware and with that model (though both are moving targets, I'd be very surprised if the unknown hardware that I've seen doing 4-5 fps was burning 12-15 kW, but it's not strictly speaking impossible it really was that power hungry).

* Specifically: on an iPhone 11, BlazeStyleGAN model was generating images in 12.14 ms, which is just over 82 fps — https://research.google/blog/mediapipe-facestylizer-on-devic...

[UltraSane]

The ultimate end-game for image-gen AI is a closed-loop system where a computer can monitor sexual arousal levels and generate the most arousing porn possible for the subject. This would be VERY addictive. Unless people can just become completely immune to all pornographic stimuli.

[ben_w]

I'd say the Matrix rather than that; most of us have a refractory period where that would at best do nothing and at worst be actively undesirable.

[debugnik]

You're assuming people will create content to consume it, and not just to spam various platforms, competing for attention. Most of it might only be ever consumed by crawlers, if at all.