[dilDDoS]

Cheaper/faster tech increases overall consumption though. Without the friction of commissioning a graphics artist to design something, a user can generate thousands of images (and iterate on those images multiple times to achieve what they want), resulting in way more images overall.

I'm not really well versed on the environmental cost, more just (neutrally) pointing out that comparing a single 10s image to a 5-6 hour commission ignores the fact that the majority of these images probably would never have existed in the first place without AI.

[runarberg]

Also, ignoring training when talking about the environmental costs is bad faith. Without training this image would not exist, and if nobody generating images like these, the training would not happen. So we should really ask, the 10 seconds it took for inference, plus the weeks or months of high intensity compute it took to train the model.

[ToValueFunfetti]

You'd want to compare against the fraction of training attributable to the image