Of course not, the wastefullness of neural network models is only my first complaint because it’s the thing that will see the first wave of NNM companies going bankrupt this year.

I don’t care about the human artist’s energy use because it’s a human that’s benefitting from having work to do and a warm, well-lit studio to do it in, while NNMs only exist to “reduce labor costs” I.E. so that corporations don’t have to pay humans and shareholders can take a bigger cut.

In addition to the sociopolitical argument, my other primary complaint is a moral one. Neural network models are based on organic neural networks, but the enumerated rights of living beings are not substrate-independent. These psychopaths are too busy torturing their third or fourth generation of digital slaves to worry about the implications of their work. They’re already building them on the scale of dog brains and at the rate they’re going they’ll be running human-scale models and maybe even simulated people before the end of the decade. I’m not so naive as to believe that the current crop of models is “alive” in the sense that dogs are, but that line is going to get very blurry very quickly as they build complexity towards the goal of “General Intelligence”. Anything that is “generally intelligent” is deserving of the same rights given to people, and lesser versions still deserve at least the same consideration we give to animals.