Amazing, she’s levitating those plants via telekinesis. Or it’s an AI image, one of those.
Down voted for ai picture
Why? Did the AI steal a job from some worried looking lady?
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It didn’t need to have a picture
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Could’ve been a stock photo or other image and no one would’ve cared about a watermark
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A waste of resources that harms the planet (the planet that you’re trying to garden on)
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Adds nothing of value to the discussion
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Normalizes the use of technology that does in fact steal jobs from people who would be better than the technology
Re. that 2023 MIT article
Their work, which is yet to be peer reviewed,
Here’s a peer reviewed article from 2024 that presents an interesting counterpoint:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x
Here is another peer reviewed paper from 2024 that argues that cautious optimism should be used when calculating the environmental and societal impact of LLMs specically:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76682-6
TLDR it seems to be more complicated than simply AI = Bad for the environment
Also I’d point out that your points 2 and 5 are kind of hypocritical. You accuse AI of ‘stealing’ jobs but then suggest someone could use a watermarked stock image without permission or a license, which is arguably a form of theft in and of itself, and could directly impact another artists job.
From the first article.
For the human writing process, we looked at humans’ total annual carbon footprints, and then took a subset of that annual footprint based on how much time they spent writing.
Which seems like a silly method of comparing emissions, given that the human doesn’t exist for the purpose of creating images. The carbon footprint of the human is still present whether or not they are generating art. For an AI, the emissions are an addition to global carbon footprint.
For the final point, a random social media post isn’t a profit seeing endeavor, which is why it isn’t expected to pay for any images it uses. The normal accepted practice is to just give credit to the source. The same is not true for news articles, which does care about there being a watermark and is expected to pay for image use. Unless of course people start accepting the normal use of ai images in which case disrupts a whole industry to provide worse art.
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Maybe a bit out of scope for “gardening”, but get to know how to sustain the life in both your garden as well as your community with as many sustainable inputs as possible.
Make your own compost and save your own seeds.
Network with people in your area.
Learn about the CSA farms in your area and see if you can contribute your little garden space to their effort in a collective manner in exchange for a complimentary CSA share (aka you use your entire plot to grow a large amount of some random veggie or herb to contribute to their program in exchange for a full season of their subscription).
Contribute excess veggies to the food bank.
Also, I hate to be “that guy”, but being a Canadian/American who pays attention to news headlines in both countries, I’ve gotta say that a shockingly substantial amount of your neighbors have no idea how fucked their world is going to be for the foreseeable future. Shit’s hitting the fan in a way that may be even bigger than 2008, and I feel like so many of us never actually recovered from that…
All that to say, “gardening” is really, really important now
Supply prices will rise if only because more people will be gardening out of need.
And because most retailers will take this opportunity to jack up prices regardless of whether the tariffs will actually impact them.
