Eh I disagree with the power usage point, specifically. Don’t listen to Altman lie through his teeth; generation and training should be dirt cheap.

See the recent Z Image, which was trained on a shoestring budget and costs basically nothing to run: https://arxiv.org/html/2511.22699v2

The task energy per image is less than what it took for me to type out this comment.

As for if we “need” it, yeah, that’s a good point and what I was curious about.

But then again… I don’t get why people use a lot of porn services. As an example, I just don’t see the appeal of OF, yet it’s a colossal enterprise.

But if we can stop people from looking at the illegal/dangerous stuff, and use AI to create it, let those people watch that instead, I think that would be a net positive. Of course you’d want to identify them, tag them and keep them separate from the rest of people; it’s not a solution to the problem they create, but if you can reduce the demand for it, I dunno, I want nothing to do with that kind of stuff, but I feel like there’s a solution in there somewhere.

CP detectors got really good well before image gen was even a thing. They had to, as image hosting sites had to filter it somehow. So that’s quite solvable.

Look at CivitAI as a modern example.

They filter deepfakes. They filter CP. They correctly categorize and tag NSFW, all automatically and (seemingly) very accurately. You are describing a long solved problem in any jurisdiction that will actually enforce their laws.

If you’re worried about power/water usage, already solved too. See frugal models like this, that could basically serve porn to the whole planet for pennies: https://arxiv.org/html/2511.22699v2

IMO the biggest sticking point is datasets… The Chinese are certainly using some questionable data for the base models folks tend to use, though the porn finetunes tend to use publicly hosted booru data and such.

How do you feel about AI porn? Excluding deepfakes.

If you think of Kadyrov

Yeah, the Chechen guy.

he’s visibly very unwell

I don’t wish sickness on folks, but honestly, that’ll help me sleep easier. What he says in public is scary.

That serves the purpose too. It’s harder to pin Plex as an “illegal distribution service” when you have to pay for access. Either the streamer or “distributor” can’t be very anonymous, which makes large scale sharing impractical.

On the other hand, the more money they squeeze out, the more they risk appearing as if they “make money from piracy,” which is exactly how you get the MPAA’s attention.

I dunno if it counts, but all the DCAU. Batman TAS, Batman Beyond, Superman, Justice League, annd more, all slices at different times with crossovers.

And Young Justice isn’t technically a part of it, but it feels post DCAU in spirit.

TIL.

You may (half) joke, but MPAA attention on Jellyfin would suck.

Every news site is biased. Read them with that mind.

As an example, one of my usual sources since like 2015 is Axios. Their site is clean, lean, and they are extremely well sourced in Washington. But they recently got a big cash infusion from OpenAI. And, surprise surprise, they post a small but steady stream of Tech Bro evangelism on the side now.

RT is generally awful, but sometimes their reporting outside of Russia, where they have incentive to dig, can be good.

Hence, my bucket for Guardian is “high class liberal catnip .” They are clickbaity. That’s they trend so much here on Lemmy.

They’re well sourced. Their integrity is leagues beyond, say, rawstory or dailybeast that get spammed on Lemmy. So you have to filter their stories with that in mind.

And this is pretty much what ALL written news is doing to survive, if they can. Because their competition on YouTube/Facebook/whatever is not bound to the same standards they are.

If they don’t, they die.

I used to write small articles for a tech hardware site. The owner chose to take the site down rather than chase the clickbait game.

“Why is the world this way?” says the blue checkmark Tweeter clutching their phone.

Though to be fair, many are more disingenuous cash farming influencers.

Playing devil’s advocate, I understand one point of pressure: Plex doesn’t want to be perceived as a “piracy app.”

See: Kodi. https://kodi.expert/kodi-news/mpaa-warns-increasing-kodi-abuse-poses-greater-video-piracy-risk/

To be blunt, that’s a huge chunk of their userbase. And they run the risk of being legally pounded to dust once that image takes hold.

So how do they avoid that? Add a bunch of other stuff, for plausible deniability. And it seems to have worked, as the anti-piracy gods haven’t singled them out like they have past software projects.

To be clear, I’m not excusing Plex. But I can sympathize.

Like it or not, that’s journalism 101. You don’t make claims unless you can directly verify them, even if they seem obvious.

And if you do, you attribute to who said it. Like the UN or IAEA.

Guardian should have just omitted that blurb from the byline, TBH.

I think you’re being abrasive about it, but are making a decent point.

Yes, lots of clickbait exaggerated Russia’s fragility. Some actual analysts underestimated certain aspects of Russia.

And Russia won many geopolitical dice rolls:

• Trump won.
• Europe is still bickering internally.
• India bought their oil for a long time.
• China stayed tolerant.
• Wagner coup failed, but only barely.

And so on.

There are some nasty, ambitious figures in Russian politics apparently “reigned in” by Putin now. If he’s deposed… what happens? Do we get a Russia fractured by warlords armed with Soviet warheads? I’d much rather see it vassalized by China or something.

And yeah, at the end of the day this is the physically largest country on Earth, backed by the most populous, invading a tiny one. Endless war is utterly catastrophic for the Russian people, but (if the US basically withdraws from NATO and Europe keeps being Europe), they are on an extremely slow track to grind down Ukraine and claim the ashes :(

Anyway, you should read ISW’s reports on the war:

https://www.understandingwar.org/

They have a quite grounded take. And from the even before the war started (when forces massed on the border), they’ve been warning that Russia has the political power to grind on. They tried to warn policymakers about the clickbait.

Eventually he’ll be replaced. We can’t influence or predict the personal characteristics of his successor, but whoever replaces him will very surely want to end the war, and doesn’t have to save face while doing that.

One thing I learned reading the ISW’s reports (especially around the Wagner coup attempt) is that Putin is apparently a moderate in Russian politics. There are some regional leaders I might honestly prefer Putin to.

For all the criticism of AI, this is the one that’s massively overstated.

On my PC, the task energy of a casual diffusion attempt (let’s say a dozen+ images in few batches) on a Flux-tier model is 300W * 240 seconds.

That’s 54 kilojoules.

…That’s less than microwaving leftovers, or a few folks browsing this Lemmy thread on laptops.

And cloud models like Nano Banana are more efficient than that, batching the heck out of generations on wider, more modern hardware, and more modern architectures, than my 3090 from 2020.

Look. There are a million reasons corporate AI is crap.

But its power consumption is a meme perpetuated by tech bros who want to convince the world scaling infinitely is the only way to advance it. That is a lie to get them money. And it is not the way research is headed.

Yes they are building too many data centers, and yes some in awful places, but that’s part of the con. They don’t really need that, and making a few images is not burning someone’s water away.

It’ll literally be a criminal hub, with a bunch of anonymized posts joking about dodging corpos. Probably.

And owls. Still owls.

FBI? No, I am not opening up.

I mean, many forums are still live.

The problem is engagement. Discord, YouTube, even Lemmy all ping you in your pocket and offer more “instant” dopamine hits than a forum or news site, hence they’ve sucked all the attention.

It works. I’m guilty of falling into it for sure, even when I keep telling myself I will change my information diet.

It’s misleading.

IBM is very much into AI, as a modest, legally trained, economical tool. See: https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite

But this is the CEO saying “We aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid.” It’s shockingly reasonable.

That’s interesting.

I dunno if that’s any better. Compiler development is hard, and expensive.

I dunno what issue they have with LLVM, but it would have to be massive to justify building around it and then switching away to re-invent it.

And the discoverability pipe is breaking.

• No one reads oldschool curators like RockPaperShotgun anymore. They’re barely afloat.

• Generic algorithmic social media like YouTube tends to snowball a few games.

• Forums are dead. Reddit is dystopian.

That leaves Steam’s algorithm, and a sea of sparsely seen solo reviewers. But there are billions of people oblivious to passion projects they’d love, and playing AAAs or gacha phone apps instead.