Walton (2024) asks ‘Is AI Art Less Carbon Intensive Than Human Art?’
They are looking at a paper by Tomlinson et al. (2024) that proposes that the carbon emissions of image and copy production are lower when we use ai opposed to when a human creates it.
Already in this blog, I have done what ai does: I have scraped info from the web, put it in a prompt for a 1000-word essay (I like plenty to work with), and now I will ‘modify’ it for my use. That, in part, is what any researcher does. What Walton and Tomlinson are asking, is whether the modification process is more intensive if a human does it or if we just let ai get on with it!
(I hope you are noticing ‘ai’, the new human-friendly abbreviation of AI, more submissive, less threatening)
Firstly, I would say it was a bloody dull rewrite using GPT-4o mini, so would need a lot of modification. Also, I can’t entirely agree with either researcher or the ai rewrite, so that will take a lot of sorting out. I am bored already, so I am off to make an ai video of the situation to cheer myself up…
So is ai less carbon-intensive than human-created art?
Walton (2024) thinks not, and Tomlinson et al. (2024) have concocted a set of stats to say it actually saves carbon. There, that’s saved you from reading 1000 words of nonsense.
Ok, I’ll elaborate a bit… let’s say ai makes art and does its writing quicker than a human doing the same task. It mathematically follows that to produce the ‘same’ work, ai produces less carbon. Well, that’s true because this bit of writing and that dreadful video has taken around 1.30. Still, it would have taken me a lot longer to write the 1000 words that I am not going to use because it’s bloody awful, and gawd know how many weeks and the amount of resources to make that genuinely dreadful video that is nothing like stuffing a genie who is an agent into a bottle!
However, let’s say I made a drawing version of my agent genie wearing dark sunglasses and animated it frame by frame. It would probably take me a day to make a few seconds of footage. So I am getting what I want, but I am expending carbon to do it, is Tomlinson et al. (2024) claim. Walton (2024) says yes, but if I didn’t do that, I would be off doing something else, possibly even more carbon-hungry. By creating something myself, I have also contributed to human cultural production and my mental well-being. Both are true, but both are flawed statements. I animate on Procreate; I store images on my iPad and in the cloud backup. If I export the animation, it lives here on my blog within a server using more carbon and more water… None of this is sustainable.
So it’s back to cave painting, then…
Meanwhile the important take away from this blog post is the word Agent.
You will be hearing a lot about ai agents in the coming months. I told you earlier in the year that AGI was coming, but not ready yet. https://mxdp.blog/2024/02/05/why-look-at-emerging-tech/
Well, agents are the next evolution in ai. It seems the Terminator vibe was not a good look, and Sintra ai has taken their agents to a new, friendly place
You might have to give it a few clicks for the video to work, but when you do it is truly disturbing… arrr I love emerging tech…
Agents are ai’s version of us. An ai Agent combines your commands with your data, emails, correspondence, style, voice, and business data, thinks about what you might want to do with it, then does it better and quicker than you and, crucially, several people you might employ to do the task. It achieves this by going off to other ai engines to do the task and returning it to you. Your work is done!
I’ve just watched the BBC Sunday politics show where Alison McGovern, the appointed Minister of State at the Department for Work and Pensions, was on about ‘making’ the ‘disabled,’ mentally ill and sick folks on benefits go back to work. To re-classify what is ‘disabled’ or unfit to work and reduce by 400,000 folks who get PIP and other benefits back to work and be productive. Along with the assisted dying bill, you can see where we are going… do the jobs that ai can’t or get bumped off.
In all fairness, I support the assisted dying bill; I want a quick and painless end, just not yet, please. I want PIP mobility allowance so I can modify my car. I want the trains to work for folks that use mobility devices. I would like the trains to work for everyone to be honest!
So, should we put the ai Genie agents back in their bottle? No, they are a cracking idea. They are the next step to AGI or ‘agi’. We should, however, be looking at carbon footprints and cooling tech. It should be mandatory to make emerging tech work for the planet, not destroy it. Something that Cop29 should have sorted, but they can’t organise a piss-up in a brewery!
This is a good read if you want to understand the problem a bit more: https://hbr.org/2023/07/how-to-make-generative-ai-greener because that Genie is out and is not going back in!
Well, that’s enough for now. Here are the links so you can read the human research. The ai re-write went in the trash!
https://medium.com/@jolindsaywalton/is-ai-art-less-carbon-intensive-than-human-art-3b7c61a4c333
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x
Tomlinson, B. et al. (2024) ‘The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans,’ Scientific Reports, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-54271-x.
Walton, J.L. (2024) ‘Is AI art less carbon intensive than human art? – Jo Lindsay Walton – Medium,’ Medium, 19 November. https://medium.com/@jolindsaywalton/is-ai-art-less-carbon-intensive-than-human-art-3b7c61a4c333.
Mx.D.P 
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