fraud, for AI slop fake art and video flooding the internet, for AI slop fake books/articles and music, for AI-generated-and-spread misinformation and disinformation, for deepfakes including deepfake porn.

The sheer stupidity of the genAI boom, given all the harm it does, is almost unbelievable.

But it entertains and deceives the gullible, lets students think they can cheat their way through school, and lets greedy company owners and execs think they can dump most of their employees so there's more money for those at the top. It almost always brings out the worst in people.

But it's new tech, so we're supposed to welcome it and adapt to it.

It's Shiny!! It's New!! It's Thing!!

We will now proceed to kill ourselves for pixels. Literally.

...image processing of TEM for printed steels.

I'll let him know it's immoral and pornographic to conduct his work.

I'll also be sure to let all the folks i know working on protein dynamics simulations to understand that their work is immoral and pornographic.

You learn something every day.

It is possible of course to generate electricity without releasing dangerous fossil fuel waste, but it's had rather dishonest bad press.

the harm other uses are causing.

...from abuse.

marketing of those tools mostly encourages those harmful uses.

I doubt valid, non-harmful scientific and medical uses of genAI account for more than a tiny percentage of the money, energy and water it uses.

And the world isn't going to benefit much from a few scientific advances if the population is dumbed down, culture is stolen so corporate-owned mimicry is sold back to us, most jobs are lost, surveillance is worsened, and the environment is seriously harmed.

...some support for this contention?

What percentage of computational data tools is used for frivolous purposes?

DU certainly uses data services. I'm sure there are people in the coming fascist government would consider it unworthy of water and electricity.

a number have been posted here.

Again, I was not including scientific research among the harms done by genAI (but I will point out that after all the hype about AlphaFold, it was revealed later that with all the hallucinations, traditional checking had to be done - https://biosciences.lbl.gov/2024/01/23/researchers-assess-alphafold-model-accuracy/ ).

The harms I mentioned to society are not "frivolous" and it's wrong to pretend they are, just as it was wrong for you to post above that I'd said that your son's work was "immoral and pornographic" when I'd said nothing remotely like that. And please don't try to confuse data center construction that tech companies have said they need for genAI with computing in general. Google's AI search, for instance, uses 10x the electricity of regular search (and often produces less reliable results, and diverts traffic from websites the data is taken from, hurting the internet).