this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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Comic Strips
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Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
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- AI-generated comics aren't allowed.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
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Image generation is often done remotely, using massive amounts of energy and water cooling. I enjoy the funny images as well, but I don't like the massive volume of AI images that make it tougher to find human artists.
Those things cost money. If it's truly "massive amounts" then why are so many image generators giving it away for free?
I generate images locally on my home computer so I actually know how much energy and cooling is required per image, it's really not that much. I'd use way more if I was making the image by hand in an image editing program.
That's just nonsense they made up, or they are confusing their anti-AI memes.
An image generator uses no more power than a video game. Most run on consumer graphics cards.
LLMs are the ones that use a lot of resources but "massive amounts" is a vague term that has no useful meaning. No matter how you try to refute their statement, they can always just declare that they mean something else.
And the same calculus applies to LLMs as to the image generators. If they're so hideously expensive how is it that companies are giving access away for free? The goodness of their own hearts? Obviously they would like for people to pay for services and are using the LLMs as a loss leader, but they're giving away so much in the way of LLM usage that I've never felt any need to pay for it myself. The average Joe isn't their target market, the average Joe doesn't have a big enough demand to be worth charging them for it.