Feedback about "On the energy usage of image generators"

[KyNorthstar]

https://blog.kyleggiero.me/Image-generators-energy-usage/

• add a link to this issue to the blog post, as an official place to leave feedback about this post
  • fix it because GitHub Pages doesn't support regex replace

Critique

• Using the numbers from unreal engine in place of numbers for Photoshop needs a more complete explanation of my reasoning
• Why does it matter that the artist is doing it for free?
  • I think I should just add in the energy of a Visa transaction. If I can find the energy usage of PayPal, cash, etc., then I should probably add those in for comparison, but not use them for the final calculation
• Doesn't mention energy difference of generating a simple vs complex image
• Needs a section on ethics
  • Make an obvious reference to that ethics section, right at the top where it can't be missed (thinking a big bright bold box of some sort)
  • Note about how art shouldn't be about profit. Actually that should be its own whole blog post... Why money harms art #70

Editing notes

• make sure the capitalization of all of the headings are consistent

Device

• calculate and point out the median device energy usage to show why this choice was made
  • "just commission, an artist", have a reminder that the iMac energy usage was at idle

Human

• change the sentence about why I chose one kilocalorie so that it says something more to the effect of "typing basically uses no energy, but so we have some into compare to, let's say one kilocalorie since that's the smallest anyone would bother to measure"
  • bundle that up with the note about scientific American proving that mental effort doesn't increase calorie consumption
• point out that I'm also not including idle human body energy usage
  • Make the title of that section reflect that, since it's not the body itself, but the usage of it
  • in the first "putting these together" section, clarify the energy usage of human activity as well

Video game

• explicitly say why We use "1 hour" as the length of a Fortnite session
  • Thanks to u/Twistin_Time for pointing this out!

Server

• Reconsider usage of "MMO" in the game server section
  • just say "a game server" in the section title
  • the aside discussing how the Fortnite energy usage paper doesn't site sources should be a citation at the bottom, not in line, because it disrupts flow
  • Same with the MMO definition
  • Sort list of sources in the server energy usage section (maybe move it to the main source list?)
  • Uses a generalized "MMO" statistic, but congratulates Fortnite specifically after discovering the energy usage per-player is ~7.8 Joules

Putting these together

• fix the math, it doesn't check out. seems the energy usage number for generating eight images is before overhead, but the multiplier is after overhead. Also, the multiplier is the same one used in commissioning an artist; it should be 26, not 24.

Googling

• in the "just Google a real image" section, the paragraph that prepares all the numbers should make "and that uses 36 kJ" parenthetical
  • break up that paragraph so that it's much more concise and obvious what the numbers are referring to. Probably move the fact that I'm assuming they have a browser shortcut to a different sentence or paragraph. Stack up the reasoning upfront and have the numbers all together.
  • "assuming it takes a single search and one minute to find what you want" might be better wording
  • Note the effects of Google image search results include generated images now. Not only does that muddy the waters in our comparisons of generated versus non-generated images, it also makes the image search take longer if you explicitly do not want a generated image

Industry

• in "The energy usage of industry-scale software development", put the order-of-magnitude guess in bold

For comparison

• In the "For comparison" make sure the captions in all of the figure boxes are consistent

Meta

• in the Meta section, move what I've ignored to the bottom (before the Calculations section)

Possible new sources

• https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-resource-consumption-of-ai-degrow-or-die

Comparison ideas

• Streaming video

[TangentFoxy]

I think the unit converter should move over to the left or right instead of pinning here. It disrupts reading where it is. Especially with a standard monitor size, there's so much margin it could be pushed into.

[KyNorthstar]

I think the unit converter should move over to the left or right instead of pinning here. It disrupts reading where it is. Especially with a standard monitor size, there's so much margin it could be pushed into.

Agreed! In fact, this post gave me the idea to add such controls to those margins, like a table of contents

[TangentFoxy]

• The alt-text for the first image contains the R-slur. I would guess this is intentional, but you did censor the slur on the image itself, so I think the alt-text should match.
• Under "For comparison", the text "avg. Tesla Model 3 yearly **commute**" appears exactly like that. Is the text supposed to just have asterisks or was that supposed to be bold?
• I would like to include an archived version of this post in my shared notes, including a disclaimer at the top about it being an archive with a link to the original source, and the dates/times included on the post for indicating what version the archive was made of. May I do this?
  • Is there a license for using this blog's content elsewhere? I didn't see one.

[TangentFoxy]

For the section on energy usage of development compared to AI generated images and training, I just stumbled across a blog post about Windows development using git. While this doesn't directly translate to energy figures, a quick very favorable estimate based on the raw scale of activity should be able to give a reasonable range of possibilities. https://web.archive.org/web/20250130085834/https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-on-the-planet/

• 8,421 pushes per day (on average)
• 2,500 pull requests, with 6,600 reviewers per work day (on average)
• 4,352 active topic branches
• 1,760 official builds per day

Obviously the builds take up the most energy, but the fastest operation they show while using git is 6 seconds per operation, so even just using idle power usage for an efficient computer for N operations * 6 seconds gives a minimum threshold value. (If I just add every number I just listed, multiply it by 6 seconds, that's 39.4 hours per day. If we assume that it's equivalent to idle time for the iMac used on the blog post, that's 380 kJ/day. Even if we pretend only the last decade was used to produce Windows, that would add up to 1.39 GJ. Obviously that's a laughably low estimate, but it's on the same order of magnitude, so it's a good indication that software development takes up the same amount of energy.)

For comparison to the sizes of other codebases, so that you can scale that estimate down to match more common development sizes: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-biggest-codebases-in-history-a128bb3eea73/

You know enough about software dev to come up with a more realistic timeframe for how long reviews and builds take. This information should be enough to at least give a range of estimates.

[KyNorthstar]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x

[Architector4]

The article says "~100 GJ avg. yearly house energy usage", sourced to this:

https://greenbuildingcanada.ca/whats-considered-energy-efficient-home/

That post in turn says the same thing without much elaboration but with its own source:

For reference, Énergie et des Ressources naturelles Québec suggests that the “average Canadian household uses 100 gigajoules of energy per year.”

I advise using that source directly, if possible. There's an extra caveat to this situation too: that source's link gives a (broken looking) 404 page.

Also while I'm mentioning this, I think it's worth noting that a few people I showed the article to say their yearly household usage, electricity + gas, tops out at 6MWh (~21.6GJ) at most. Completely anecdotal of course, but I feel it's worth noting that they found the "~100 GJ" number quite unrealistic lol

[TangentFoxy]

To add on to what @Architector4 is saying, I didn't notice that figure when I read it at first, but I internalized that the average power use of a house is about the same as an internal combustion vehicle on a yearly basis because of just how inefficient burning fuel is, which would make that number very incorrect as you also highlight a Hummer EV as just under 25 GJ, which should be closer to what an ICE vehicle is using.

The 100 GJ figure is likely too high.

I wondered if Canadian households average higher energy use due to heating? This source shows 63.6% of energy use is for space heating, while this source for the USA shows 43% of energy use for space heating.

The US EIA shows an average household use of 10,500 kWh (37.8 GJ) per year. Canadian households seem to use more power. I found multiple sources showing 11,000+ kWh.. but Statistics Canada shows much more energy use! While there is a lot of variance the table there shows energy use is closer to 100 GJ than not.

• I made a spreadsheet to verify this and found that the average Canadian household uses between 85.5 GJ and 91.4 GJ per year - at least between 2019 and 2021, with a falling trend partially driven by type of housing change.

Makes me question where I got that idea that vehicle use and household energy are comparable. They are the same order of magnitude on average, it seems, but that's changing. A gallon of gas has 33.7 kWh, there are 1.4 billion vehicles and 300 billion gallons of gas used per year. While gas is used for non-vehicle things, that is a minority of usage, so it should be roughly accurate to say that the average vehicle uses 26 GJ per year (note that this number is pulled down significantly by most EVs being much more efficient).