Eating the world ...

Getty / Futurism

Eating the world, a terrifying concept, goes prime time as text to video shows why video's a resource hog to the max. Yours truly does video and files sizes of same are immense. Did one for my town. Raw content, try 38 gigs. Crunched, 5. Now have ChatGPT or Veo do the drill of making videos using text to replace a video editor like DaVinci in real time. Video file sizes are similar but eating the world applies even more because AI hoovers up energy resources to the max to produce the video in question, a process far more energy intensive than previously thought.

Researchers have found that the carbon footprint of generative AI-based tools that can turn text prompts into images and videos is far worse than we previously thought.

As detailed in a new paper, researchers from the open-source AI platform Hugging Face found that the energy demands of text-to-video generators quadruple when the length of a generated video doubles — indicating that the power required for increasingly sophisticated generations doesn’t scale linearly.

For instance, a six-second AI video clip consumes four times as much energy as a three-second clip.

“These findings highlight both the structural inefficiency of current video diffusion pipelines and the urgent need for efficiency-oriented design,” the researchers concluded in their paper.

Experts are warning that we’re rolling out generative AI tools without a full grasp of their true environmental impacts.

“Ultimately, we found that the common understanding of AI’s energy consumption is full of holes,” MIT Technology Review wrote in a recent analysis.

While image generators used the equivalent of five seconds of microwave warming to generate a single 1,024 x 1,024 pixel image, video generators proved far more energy-intensive. To spit out a five-second clip, the researchers found that it takes the equivalent of running a microwave for over an hour. If they’re consuming far more power as the length increases, the math doesn’t look good.

Endgame. Think of the energy requirements when the Veo's of the world do full length blockbusters
as this is going to happen because its cheaper.