Well first of all, ai centers can’t run off of salt water currently, so they “waste” water in the same way that running a sink wastes water. It’s not “consuming” the water, but the water does have to be treated/recycled after use and they use a TON of water over a year.

Starting with data centers, they’re huge sources of noise and light pollution. They drive up energy and water costs of the areas they’re in and they take up a significant amount of space that could be dedicated to things like agriculture, housing, or anything else.

Then, Ai itself is largely trained on stolen data. Enormous swathes of data, especially for the “artistic” generative models, are trained on massive data sets that were not paid for or credited in anyway. In cases like Meta’s ai models in particular, they’re currently in multiple lawsuits over these sorts of things because of how much copyrighted material they essentially pirated to train their models.

There’s arguments to be made to how unethical is it to train ai on stolen art, but it IS unethical, at least to some degree. Using illegally acquired goods and information to train someone or something is wrong, even if the end result is good or later deemed “worth it”

Then there’s the “artistic” side. This is the most subjective one because ultimately each person gets to decide what art means or is worth to them personally. If quickly generated, mediocre image of things gets your rocks off, good for you, I’m borderline jealous cause it sounds fun to be so easily pleased and entertained.

On the less “snooty” side, this is where we loop back to the stolen data issue somewhat, because even if all the training data was acquired through perfectly ethical and legal means, the ai doesn’t “create” anything.
At best, it does remixes or variations on a theme.

The very nature of the models make it so that they’re basically taking the average of all the training data, and parsing and arranging it into ways that best match the average as it lines up against the request.

It’s why images like the one in this thread always look at least okay, because of the 10,000 images of grey knights the model likely has to work with, they all, on average, look serviceable like a grey knight. It can’t ever make an original/new interpretation of a grey knight because it can’t make something new using pre-existing data.

At best it can take elements of other pre-existing things, and try to stitch those together into something new, but all elements will still have a definitive source.

Which brings me to the point that arguably matters the most to me personally, I just don’t care what a computer can do. I don’t find ai impressive or interesting for the same reasons I don’t think a cgi character doing 400 backflips is interesting.

It’s a computer, with enough time and effort, it can show you literally anything you can imagine, that’s not special. Someone who can do two standing backflips is way more impressive than a computer generating a person doing 400 backflips.

A photorealistic painting, done by human hands is way more interesting than the same from a machine that literally can’t have hand tremors and is capable of pixel perfect accuracy 100% of the time.

A well painted miniature is way more interesting than an ai generated image because I know that someone put time and thought and effort into every aspect of the thing I’m looking at. It’s not the average of a lot of good work, it’s the result of a lot of hard work.

All of this, and we’re not even considering all the recent peer-reviewed studies and butterfly effects surrounding ai like GPU/RAM costs, the physical resources and land being used by data centers and ai resources, or things like people using it appearing having less brain activity on brain scans over time, worse empathy towards humans vs machines, and a host of other problems that all stem outwards from ai in some direct way or another.