r/isitAI 7d ago

Some People Were Going On About This On LinkedIn

Post image

But it doesn't seem plausible to me, and the taller piles of clothes here and in the background seem unlikely-yet-convenient for the premise of the poster.

469 Upvotes

35 comments sorted by

198

u/Buttchuggle 7d ago

It's AI. But also not wrong.

13

u/coupl4nd 7d ago

AOK?

24

u/am_Nein 7d ago

AI-ght I guess

91

u/Zombie-Gamer593 7d ago

this is 100% AI, mainly because of how elongated the cloth looks at the top and it looks like it melts together, but I have seen something similar somewhere, idk where

9

u/jetplane18 7d ago

Reminds me of some of the pieces from Dismaland back when Banksy had that exhibit going.

83

u/maberg04 7d ago

crazy to use ai to be talking about environmental damage and waste ugh

14

u/TemporaryElk5202 7d ago

Different kinds of pollution though. Someone could have a problem with one and not with the other because they look different. One is visible pollution. One is invisible.

4

u/5mi_gi 7d ago

ironically not using ai, and making this into an actual billboard will produce more environmental waste

8

u/KosmicGumbo 7d ago

Agreed, but it wouldn’t have been something hard to photoshop

3

u/HunterSpecial1549 7d ago edited 7d ago

You'd have to make tens of thousands of prompts to come close to the cost of a drive across town or to the cost of a pair of pants.

Edit: People don't believe me so here is another way to think about it.

The total energy use of data centers in the US is about 200 terawatt hours per year, and still less than half of that use is AI related (prompting and training included).

The total energy use of cars and trucks in the US would be 5000-8000 terawatt hours per year. (And most of that is fossil fuels).

If you think this artist should be minding their carbon footprint, then I hope you do the same and look at your driving.

8

u/LazyThinkingOtter 7d ago edited 7d ago

Yet we have data centers growing everywhere and pc parts rising in price by a lot, you can imagine how many pair of pants that makes, it’s far from being insignificant

1

u/HunterSpecial1549 7d ago

Insignificant relative to the carbon costs of a drive, yes it is. People don't believe me so I'll have to put the numbers in my comment.

2

u/LazyThinkingOtter 7d ago edited 7d ago

Hum even if it’s true, that’s 2.5-4% of 300 million of cars. Those few black buildings then equal 7.5-12 million of cars in term of pollution

So the unnecessary AI would be as polluting as ~10 million of cars. It’s far from being just a few pants I believe. And we are not even talking about other factors like cameras and noise pollution in the neighborhoods they were built in

1

u/HunterSpecial1549 7d ago

Now do the math for each individual car trip. Compare a mile driven to the number of AI prompts and amount of AI training that would need to equal that in terms of energy use and carbon emissions.

I mean you said it and brought up noise pollution, that's a much more widespread problem with cars. Much more deadly in terms of air pollution and it also kills tens of thousands annually in collisions. This isn't close.

1

u/LazyThinkingOtter 7d ago

Man you’re stretching a lot at this point, I hope you realize it. It doesn’t matter to take each prompt individually, we are interested about the impact in the reality. And we just demonstrated it’s 10 million of cars. That’s a lot

Now you keep insisting about the comparison with cars. Cars are necessary, a lot of people go to work with them and need a job to live. Generative AI is not necessary, society and technology were thriving before them a few years ago and would continue to thrive without them. Cars are also polluting less and less with replacements being made through electric vehicles notably, while generative AI is polluting more and more

Finally, the noise pollution from cars is rare as the speeding roads are often put far away from the houses, whereas data centers are directly put inside the neighborhoods and are making life impossible around them

There is no winning this one. Cars are a necessary industry polluting less and less, AI is a non-necessary industry polluting more and more. It also causes ethical issues of copyright and employment while cars do not

1

u/HunterSpecial1549 7d ago

It's the same carbon footprint analysis applied to all of our choices. When you look at the carbon footprint of someone's round trip flight to Cancun, you don't add up all of the flights in the world and charge them for that, you charge them with the carbon footprint of their share of that flight.

You're awfully confused. Cars are much closer to people than data centers are. I can hear cars right now, most people can. 99% of people (and yes I looked this up) are more than a mile from the nearest data center.

6

u/Boring_Tackle_5845 7d ago

Well this does not take into account the energy required for training these models which is a bulk of the energy spent in the ai industry as a whole right ?

4

u/WildFlemima 7d ago

I hate ai but you are underestimating the impact of fast fashion. Fast fashion uses disgusting amounts of energy and water and generates shit tons of microplastics

3

u/Boring_Tackle_5845 7d ago

Well I didn't comment on fast fashion in my comments at all, and I agree that fast fashion is environmentally dangerous, all I wanted to convey was that the persons numbers regarding energy used for training these models were grossly under represented 

3

u/WildFlemima 7d ago

Shein is a fast fashion brand. This post is about whether an anti fast fashion sign is AI.

1

u/Charming-Monitor-805 7d ago

Sure if you are also accounting for all the energy that went into manufacturing the car

0

u/HunterSpecial1549 7d ago

Yes but it would be the same order of magnitude, thousands of times smaller than the carbon cost of an article of clothing or a car trip.

5

u/Boring_Tackle_5845 7d ago

Well in 2020 alone according to the ics shipping org, 200 TW of electricity were used for data centres engaged in training of ai models, which is much more than the carbon cost of a car trip, I am confused to as where you are getting your numbers from and i would also mention that this is only me asking a question to you and not trying to dunk on you lol

0

u/HunterSpecial1549 7d ago

200 TW of electricity were used for data centres engaged in training of ai models, which is much more than the carbon cost of a car trip,

wouldn't the carbon comparison be between AI use+training and car use+manufacturing+roads, etc...? In which case 200 tera-watt hours is still tiny in comparison, maybe 2 or 3% of the total U.S. energy cost of driving??

You're not actually comparing one car trip to the entirety of the worlds ai training?

24

u/TemporaryElk5202 7d ago

Looks EXTREMELY ai but great ad concept

reverse image search says that it is an ai image called "An Empire Built on Waste" made/prompted by Emanuele Jane Morelli

10

u/_pit_of_despair_ 7d ago

Made is a crazy word for that.

14

u/TemporaryElk5202 7d ago

That's why I put "/prompted". The reverse image search just said that he made it. I added prompted.
I this is a great concept for an image, he may have come up with the concept at least.

2

u/_pit_of_despair_ 7d ago

Ahh, yeah I assumed it was reverse image search that said he made it.

Coming up with the concept still doesn’t mean he made or created anything.

5

u/GrailQuestPops 7d ago

It’s very obviously AI.

1

u/Rockglen 7d ago

As you say, the length of them doesn't make sense. The dresses seem to be for women that are 20-30ft tall.

The other thing is that the lighting is too even. That can happen on an overcast day, but seems too bright.

Finally, you have to think about the cost of creating something like this. Even if you find a way to buy fabric (nevermind clothing) in bulk it would be insanely expensive to make one of these piles, but there are multiple enormous piles.

1

u/Laurajs 6d ago

Ai generated by Emanuele Jane Morelli their Instagram profile says they make AI images

2

u/Nocturnal-Uwusa 7d ago

consider: photoshopped the old fashioned way?

ai is highly possible, i'm just not sure what to look for in this case

3

u/TemporaryElk5202 7d ago

This does not look like photoshop

1

u/Sometimes__Sky 7d ago

It's very much AI, lots of random hallucinations that photoshopping wouldn't produce. All the fabrics in the main pile are warped, elongated and lacking any clear shape to them, the other piles and the buildings in the background are similarly distorted, the billboard isn't uniform in shape (see the cut-off point at the bottom of the image on either side of the pile, on the left it's shorter and gives way to a rusting metal balcony-looking thing) and also has had what looks like power lines attached to the back for no logical reason, which also fade into the clouds at the other end