Big Advertising Move By Big Oil; From Of Greenwashing To "You Can't Live Without Us", Along W. Lots Of Tech Hopium

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8. It's important to remember, too, that what we see of genAI stuff posted online is only the tip of the

iceberg in terms of how much is generated.

It isn't unusual, for instance, for any AI images you see online to have left an unseen trail of dozens or even hundreds of rejected images behind them - every single one of those rejected images also wasting electricity and water.

Google's Gemini, for instance, allows people using the free tier to generate 100 images, and those paying for the lowest subscription to generate 1,000 images a day.

They know users don't really need to produce that many usable images. They allow so many images both because so much of what AI generates will be even worse than what's posted, and because AI users often have only the vaguest idea of what they want when they start generating, and will pick and choose between wildly different options the AI offers. And if the AI user wants to have the AI edit an image they're mostly happy with, that can require generating lots more images as well, because the AI will often alter another part of the image that the AI user didn't want altered. I've never forgotten seeing an AI user on X whining one day that he'd spent all afternoon trying to get AI to get the cigarette right in an image he'd generated of someone smoking.

There are millions if not billions of AI images generated every day, and that's probably the single greatest AI use creating the race to build those horrible data centers.