A single image generated with Google’s nanobanana pro uses the same energy as your 9W bulb does in 30 minutes. That is not sustainable, even if you are a 5 trillion dollar company. With that in mind, are creators truly cooked or is the proverbial frying pan not what it seems?
- Why AI growth is not sustainable Most AI companies are not profitable. They are burning cash to one up the competition and keep their stock up. Even Google quietly replaced their flagship image gen model with an inferior version to keep up things sustainable. OpenAI’s Sora made $2 million in its lifetime while costing $15 million per day to run before Sam Altman axed it. While AI is here to stay and it will keep getting better, it’s not going to replace 99% of humans like what some might claim.
- The act of creation If you are just starting out to learn something then don’t let the doomsday talk discourage you. The tool we use to create is an ever changing variable but the act of creating itself is a constant that makes us human. Lock in, put in the hours, use AI to research, help and work for you but don’t let it keep you from creating something that makes you happy. It is said that it takes 10,000 hours before you can truly master something. That is not getting replaced by a program running on a data center somewhere. Experienced designers using AI will always be better vs. someone with 0 design experience prompting into an AI model and hoping for the best. The intuition on what looks good comes from experience of creating, not from the latest claude update that Amodei might deem “sentient’.
- Deceptive marketing galore AI companies have one goal and that’s to get more users. To that end we get marketing campaigns. Some market with dignity while others are known as Higgsfield. While AI is a very real threat that’s taking over jobs, it’s crucial not to fall for every “creators are cooked” posts out there and panic buy some AI subscription. More often than not, the content showcased is a cherry picked example achieved after burning thousands of dollars worth of credits.
- AI skills are important, human communication even more so. This is not a “don’t use AI” post. AI is part of most creative workflows these days. You will be using these tools just like any other. But, in a world where founders, managers and clients are exposed to deceptive marketing - the skill that will be more useful than ever is communication. A founder is not going to buy that $1000 higgsfield subscription and spend all his day generating AI slop. They will want a human to bring them results and your goal is to show why you’re the right person. “I know how to use Claude design” will not cut that. You need to stand out with practical skill sets and how you present those matters. Building relationships, being clear in your communication, listening to your client’s needs and navigating disagreements tactfully are all essential regardless of whether AI exists or not. Don’t let Grok write that pitch. Read a book like those from authors like Dale Carnegie and upskill your writing. Then put your heart and soul into it.
- Local vs Cloud based AI Large AI models require huge data centers to work. This takes a lot of compute power which is why everything from that laptop to a SD card has gone up in price. Mega crops are hoarding consumer supply to grow their AI capacity because there simply isn’t enough compute resources. Meanwhile, as we have seen with Google, a mega-corp does not give two shits about the user and will change the model or its capabilities at any day. Their goal is to farm data in the name of personalisation to train their AI model and sell the data to the highest bidder for targeted ads. Imagine building a business model around the capability of an AI model only for it to fall apart because the company released an update which nerfed its outputs. Now that’s not to say that AI is not useful. If you are going to add AI into your workflow then it’s preferable to use models which run locally on your system. If it’s something that runs locally then you don’t have to worry about outages or the company making changes to the model without informing the users. On the other hand, if you are using cloud based tools then look into open-source models (Deepseek/Kimi vs. Claude). Open source models are accessible by multiple providers which prevents the chances of having a single point of failure on something you depend on.
- The death of critical thinking AI can be very useful for research, ideations and letting it think for you in the name of automation. But it’s best to use it to aid the creative process, not to be the creative process. Most LLMs are next word predictors, in that they often come to the same conclusion based on their training data. You don’t want to be reliant on such tech to come up with ideas for you. The brain is also an organ that benefits from mental exercise and turning that thinking side off because GPT will do it for you is a bad idea.
- Final Thoughts If you managed to get so far then congratulations. Your attention span is not shot to hell from reels and “AI can do it now” logic. Go pickup that paintbrush, make that music, open that design file waiting on your laptop, do that photography you always wanted. Create, Create, Create. Fight against the mega corps by choosing open-source and local over cloud dependency. Keep the creative space and internet as we know it from turning into an AI hellscape. submitted by /u/steveplusf
Originally posted by u/steveplusf on r/ArtificialInteligence
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