Hugging Face Researchers Warn AI-Generated Video Consumes Much More Power Than Expected

"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," writes Futurism: 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... Fortunately, there are ways to slim down those demands, including intelligent caching, the reusing of existing AI generations, and "pruning," meaning the sifting out of inefficient examples from training datasets.
The Hugging Face researchers gave their paper a cheeky title. "Video Killed the Energy Budget: Characterizing the Latency and Power Regimes of Open Text-to-Video Mode."

Burn the Earth

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

But I want to burn the Earth to a cinder so I can make AI images of Goth girls with 3 boobs!!

Re:

[awwshit]

AI generated political slop will be the end of us all.

Re: Burn the Earth

[Fons_de_spons]

There is life beyond the digital world. Come on, put on those shoes, take a walk. It will be boring at first.

Re:

[awwshit]

slashdot is about the extent of my social media experience. But I don't represent most people.

AI Buggles

[kackle]

"Video killed the planet this far..."

Re:

[OrangeTide]

I'm generally against activities that worsen climate change and against the use of AI. But you pose a very convincing argument.

Bet they knew already knew that and...

[haruchai]

thought "our AI can fix this"

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

The AI-slop-vendors must have known it given that the default length of videos seems to be around the 5s mark, with charges increasing steeply once you go past that point.

Youtube now with "AI short videos"...

[ffkom]

... at the press of a button. See here how Youtube just turbo-charged the AI-slop-video generation [youtube.com]... and nothing but a waste of time and energy will result.

Re:

[dohzer]

YouTube Shorts were already enough of a waste of energy before they added AI.

Propaganda

[Dripdry]

Just fyi, the real reason for high electricity prices is not due to AI and data centers. Itâ(TM)s due to middleman that demand a very high return every year.

High prices could be fixed immediately if state governments mandated a lower return on this and had more sane policies around energy. Instead, blaming AI and data centers is a red herring and it just keeps feeding oligarchs tons of cash on the backs of everyone else.

Re:

[luther349]

yep no worse then crypto running running tons of gpus at full power all the time.

Re:

[allo]

Just as the real reason for many layoffs is not AI. But if you are asked for a reason for something unpopular and there is a scapegoat in the room, you point at it.

415 Wh

[glowworm]

From the paper:

WAN2.1-T2V-14B consumes over 415 Wh

So, generate slop with this model for a whole hour and it uses 415 watts of power? What they don't seem to mention - that I could find - is how many minutes of slop they generated in that hour of use.

To me, a pure Watts/Slop metric would be more useful, and far more compelling. To that end, I propose the Zuck as a measurement to encapsulate watts/slop-second. If a 10 second video takes 10 real minutes at 415Wh then that's 69 watts or 6.9 Zucks of power (a

Re:

[TheMiddleRoad]

I want an end-to-end measurement of slop wattage. From mining to transporting to the ham sandwich of the "engineer" who types in the prompt that generates prompts that generate the slop.

Why isn't California smacking down AI?

[Fly Swatter]

They claim to lead the energy efficiency and planet saving causes - but they aren't doing a thing about AI as it undoes in 1 year any planet saving gains from everything California has done for decades?

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Same reason we aren't doing anything about housing insecurity due to unavailable housing units, it's called capitalism. California may lead on those things, even by a lot, but it's not enough. As long as money runs everything, everything will continue to degrade, because money doesn't have a heart.

Look at what happened in Paradise, CA. PGE skipped their contractual maintenance obligations regarding both equipment maintenance and brush clearing, a literally 99 year old hook failed, and 85 people died in the

And nobody gives a sht

[SuperDre]

Who cares if it consumes much more power than expected, except for the writers of the paper. It still uses much MUCH less energy as when people would actually film and manually create these sequences.

Re:

[allo]

People who want to improve on it care. You could also have said "AI images now have good quality, who cares about text I can add it in a graphics program afterward" but people cared and kept improving. Because people now have a look at why it scales like that, you will have the model that generates a few minutes of video on your phone in a few years. I don't get why people think researching issues would be bad. Without new research there are no new solutions.

Re: And nobody gives a sht

[SuperDre]

Because we don't need research to state the obvious. People are already looking into shortcuts and trying to improve on it.

Re:

[allo]

That's not how science works[1]. If you say "the sky is blue"[7] you need a citation, otherwise you have to proof it in your own work.