Legend has it that every new technology is first used for something related to sex or pornography. That seems to be the way of humankind.
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, HTML, URLs, and HTTP.
tal
joined 2 years ago
most AI generated content that tries to look real ends up quite uncanny
I think that a lot of people who say this have looked at a combination of material produced by early models and operated by humans who haven't spent time adapting to any limitations that can't be addressed on the software side. And, yeah, they had limitations ("generative AI can't do fingers!") but those have rapidly been getting ironed out.
I remember posting one of the first images I generated with Flux to a community here, a jaguar lying next to a white cat. This was me just playing around. I wouldn't have been able to tell you that it wasn't a photograph. And that was some time back, and I'm not a full-time user, professionally-aimed at trying to make use of the stuff.
kagis
Yeah, here we are.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/27441182
"Cats"
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/b97e6455-2c37-4343-bdc4-5907e26b1b5d.png
I could not distinguish between that and a photograph. It doesn't have the kind of artifacts that I could identify. At the time, I was shocked, because I hadn't realized that the Flux people had been doing the kind of computer vision processing on their images as part of the training process required to do that kind of lighting work at generation time. That's using a model that's over a year old
forever, at the rate things are changing
from a non-expert on just local hardware, and was just a first-pass, not a "generate 100 and pick the best", or something that had any tweaking involved.
Flux was not especially amenable, as diffusion models go, to the generation of pornography last I looked, but I am quite certain that there will be photography-oriented and real-video oriented models that will be very much aimed at pornography.
And that was done with the limited resources available in the past. There is now a lot of capital going towards advancing the field, and a lot of scale coming.
As for the ‘corporate control’ aspect, all this stuff is racing towards locally run anyway (since it’s free).
I am not at all sure about that. I use an XT 7900 XTX and a Framework Desktop with an AI Max 395+, both of which I got to run LLMs and diffusion models locally, so I've no certainly no personal aversion to local compute.
But there are a number of factors pulling in different directions. I am very far from certain that the end game here is local compute.
In favor of local
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Privacy.
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Information security. It's not that there aren't attacks that can be performed using just distribution of static models (If Anyone Builds It, We All Die has some interesting theoretical attacks along those lines), but if you're running important things at an institution that depend on some big, outside service, you're creating creating attack vectors into your company's systems. Not to mention that even if you trust the AI provider and whatever government has access to their servers, you may not trust them to be able to keep attackers out of their infrastructure. True, this also applies to many other cloud-based services, but there are a number of places that run services internally for exactly this reason.
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No network dependency for operation, in terms of uptime. Especially for things like, say, voice recognition for places with intermittent connection, this is important.
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Good latency. And no bandwidth restrictions. Though a lot of uses today really are not very sensitive to either.
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For some locales, regulatory restrictions. Let's say that one is generating erotica with generative AI stuff, which is a popular application. The Brits just made portraying strangulation in pornography illegal. I suspect that if random cloud service is permitting for generation of erotic material involving strangulation, they're probably open to trouble. Random Brit person who is running a model locally may well not be in compliance with the law (I don't recall if it's just commercial provision or not) but in practical terms, it's probably not particularly enforceable. That may be a very substantial factor based on where someone lives. And the Brits are far from the most-severe. Iranian law, for example, permits execution for producing pornography involving homosexuality.
In favor of cloud
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Power usage. This is, in 2025, very substantial. A lot of people have phones or laptops that run off batteries of limited size. Current parallel compute hardware to run powerful models at a useful rate can be pretty power hungry. My XT 7900 XTX can pull 355 watts. That's wildly outside the power budget of portable devices. An Nvidia H100 is 700W, and there are systems that use a bunch of those. Even if you need to spend some power to transfer data, it's massively outweighed by getting the parallel compute off the battery. My guess is that even if people shift some compute to be local (e.g. offline speech recognition) it may be very common for people with smartphones to use a lot of software that talks to remote servers for a lot of heavy-duty parallel compute.
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Cooling. Even if you have a laptop plugged into wall power, you need to dissipate the heat. You can maybe use eGPU accelerators for laptops
I kind of suspect that eGPUs might see some degree of resurgence for this specific market, if they haven't already
but even then, it's noisy.
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Proprietary models. If proprietary models wind up dominating, which I think is a very real possibility, AI service providers have a very strong incentive to keep their models private, and one way to do that is to not distribute the model.
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Expensive hardware. Right now, a lot of the hardware is really expensive. It looks like an H100 runs maybe $30k at the moment, maybe $45k. A lot of the applications are "bursty"
you need to have access to an H100, but you don't need sustained access that will keep that expensive hardware active. As long as the costs and applications look like that, there's a very strong incentive to time-share hardware, to buy a pool of them and share them among users. If I'm using my hardware 1% of the time, I only need to pay something like 1% as much if I'm willing to use shared hardware. We used to do this back when all computers were expensive, had dumb terminal and teletypes that connected to "real" computers that ran with multiple users sharing access to hardware. That could very much again become the norm. It's true that I expect that hardware capable of a given level of parallel compute will probably tend to come down (though there's a lot of unfilled demand to meet). And it's true that the software can probably be made more hardware-efficient than it is today. Those argue for costs coming down. But it's also true that the software guys probably can produce better output and more-interesting applications if they get more-powerful hardware to play with, and that argues for upwards pressure.
- National security restrictions. One possible world we wind up in is where large parallel compute systems are restricted, because it's too dangerous to permit people to be running around with artificial superintelligences. In the Yudkowsky book I link to above, for example, the authors want international law to entirely prohibit beefy parallel-compute capability to be available to pretty much anyone, due to the risks of artificial superintelligence, and I'm pretty sure that there are also people who just want physical access to parallel compute restricted, which would be a lot easier if the only people who could get the hardware were regulated datacenters. I am not at all sure that this will actually happen, but there are people who have real security concerns here, and it might be that that position will become a consensus one in the future. Note that I think that we may already be "across the line" here with existing hardware if parallel compute can be sharded to a sufficient degree, across many smaller systems
your Bitcoin mining datacenter running racks of Nvidia 3090s might already be enough, if you can design a superintelligence that can run on it.
I don't like country, myself, but in a large genre like that, I am absolutely confident that you can find artists of any political position.
EDIT:
https://old.reddit.com/r/CountryMusicStuff/comments/1imd3yr/best_liberalleft_wing_artists/
Best Liberal/Left Wing artists
Hey everyone. I'm a big fan of country music and I really enjoy the more stripped-back sound of Zach Bryan and Tyler Childers.
I don't live in America and there's a bit of a perception where I live that Country music is for conservatives/Trump supporters. I often find myself having to explain to people that country music is for everyone.
In any case, I don't want to give my money to any artist who supports Trump. I was a bit disappointed to see Zach Bryan pictured with Trump yesterday. I'm not looking to argue with anyone here and I appreciate that not everyone will agree with me - I just want your suggestions! Do you have any suggestions for liberal or left wing artists to listen to?
thread with 603 comments follows
https://www.investopedia.com/warren-buffett-s-massive-war-chest-11826399
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK.A, BRK.B) has amassed the largest pile of cash ever held by a public company. At $344 billion, Berkshire Hathaway's war chest is more than the combined cash reserves of Apple Inc. (AAPL), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Alphabet Inc. (GOOG), Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), and NVIDIA Corp (NVDA)—despite them being collectively 14 times Berkshire's market value.12 Also striking is that the record-breaking stockpile has doubled in just over a year.
So what gives? As in everyday life, companies save for three main reasons: to prepare to weather an economic storm, to make a major purchase, or because they think what's available isn't worth it—in market parlance, it's overvalued.
A key chart value investors like Buffett use could help us narrow down the options: the S&P 500 index's historic price-to-earnings ratio. That's because it now sits 67% above its historical norm and almost 50% above its early 2022 value. This remarkable deviation could be a major reason that the famed Oracle of Omaha could be storing cash.
Why Buffett's Cash Pile Keeps Growing
Buffett famously preaches a straightforward investing philosophy: Be fearful when others are greedy. Given Buffett's "pledge" to Berkshire shareholders to practice "extreme fiscal conservatism" and since market valuations have been well above historical norms, it's no surprise, perhaps, that Berkshire sold over $100 billion in stocks during the first nine months of 2024, including cutting its massive stake in Apple by two-thirds.
No problem. Yeah, it's an invaluable off-site resource that new users don't get informed about. Indexes all of the Threadiverse instances, whereas any given instance can only search the communities that are local or at least one local user has subscribed to.
It would enable him to start fucking his daughter
I don't think that Melania's presence stateside has anything to do with the legality of Trump having sex with his daughter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_incest_in_the_United_States
In all but two states (and the special case of Ohio, which "targets only parental figures"),[1] incest is criminalized between consenting adults. In New Jersey and Rhode Island, incest between consenting adults (16 or over for Rhode Island, 18 or over for New Jersey) is not a criminal offense, though marriage is not allowed in either state. New Jersey also increases the severity of underage sex offenses by a degree if they are also incestuous, and also criminalizes incest with 16-17 year olds (the normal age of consent in New Jersey is 16). Ohio allows incest between consenting adults only when one party is not a parental figure (see table below) to the other.
So, that'd work in Rhode Island or New Jersey, as long as they don't marry, but I don't think that the public in either of those two states is too keen on Trump.
EDIT: For context, note that I'm assuming that ubergeek is referencing this:
He’s previously called her hot, saying she had the “best body” and speaking on The View even said “if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her.”
Not an area of my expertise, but Wikipedia has coverage:
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First Suandese Civil War (1955–1972)
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Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005)
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War in Darfur (2003–2020)
Context, for those not familiar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilsa%2C_She_Wolf_of_the_SS
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is a 1975 Canadian nazisploitation film about a sadistic and sexually voracious Nazi prison camp commandant.
Actually, if I were Canada, I'd probably want to be selling lumber into the EU too, which would make their life a lot easier regarding the US.
The EU has gotten a lot of lumber from Russia.
Canada has had long-standing trade disputes with the US over lumber, where the US lumber industry has pushed for protectionist policy. Like, decades and decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_softwood_lumber_dispute
The Canada–U.S. Softwood Lumber Dispute is one of the largest and most enduring trade disputes between both nations.[1] This conflict arose in 1982 and its effects are seen till today. British Columbia, the major Canadian exporter of softwood lumber to the United States, was most affected, reporting losses of 9,494 direct and indirect jobs between 2004 and 2009.[2]
If Canada had two very large markets, that'd probably make their life easier. And the EU does not have a lot of lumber, which is why masonry construction is more common than in the US and Canada in most of Europe.
kagis
American import taxes on softwood from Canada now total 45.16 per cent for most Canadian producers.
The U.S. Department of Commerce raised duty rates in the summer. Lumber supplies from Canada currently face an anti-dumping duty rate of 14.63 per cent and a countervailing duty rate of 20.53 per cent, equalling 35.16 per cent for most Canadian producers. That’s up sharply from duties totalling 14.4 per cent previously.
New 10-per-cent tariffs on shipments of softwood lumber from Canada and other countries took effect on Oct. 14. U.S. President Donald Trump announced the new levies in late September, citing Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, which allows him to impose tariffs on the basis of national-security concerns.
“This situation is the direct result of the protectionist economic policies advanced by President Donald Trump,” Mr. Parmar said.
https://globalnews.ca/news/11477871/bc-softwood-lumber-tariffs-us-higher-russia/
B.C.’s softwood lumber U.S. tariffs now higher than Russia’s: ‘Let that sink in’
https://forestmachinemagazine.com/russian-conflict-timber/
Due to take effect from the end of December 2025, the EUDR is the EU’s most meaningful effort yet to end its complicity in skyrocketing levels of forest destruction and affiliated human rights abuses. It does this by regulating the trade in timber, palm oil, soy, beef and other products driving that destruction. The law would also greatly aid efforts to stem the EU’s imports of conflict plywood from Russia and Belarus.
So, I'm just talking about whether-or-not the end game is going to be local or remote compute. I'm not saying that one can't generate pornography locally, but asking whether people will do that, whether the norm will be to run generative AI software locally (the "personal computer" model that came to the fore in the mid-late 1970s and on or so) or remotely (the "mainframe" model, which mostly preceded it).
Yes, one can generate pornography locally....but what if the choice is between a low-resolution, static SDXL (well, or derived model) image or a service that leverages compute to get better images or something like real-time voice synth, recognition, dialogue, and video? I mean, people can get static pornography now in essentially unbounded quantities on the Internet; It is in immense quantity; if someone spent their entire lives going through it, they'd never, ever see even a tiny fraction of it. Much of it is of considerably greater fidelity than any material that would have been available in, say, the 1980s; certainly true for video. Yet...even in this environment of great abundance, there are people subscribing to commercial (traditional) pornography services, and getting hardware and services to leverage generative AI, even though there are barriers in time, money, and technical expertise to do so.
And I'd go even further, outside of erotica, and say that people do this for all manner of things. I was really impressed with Wolfenstein 3D when it came out. Yet...people today purchase far more powerful hardware to run 3D video games. You can go and get a computer that's being thrown out that can probably run dozens of simultaneous instances of Wolfenstein 3D concurrently...but virtually nobody does so, because there's demand for the new entertainment material that the new software and hardware permits for.