And just like that, I’m using AI all the time.
I’m not alone. AI says 19 percent of Americans use AI daily. If you’re not among them, you will be. It is as transforming as the Internet.
It took me years to learn how to enter search words into Google to get the links I needed to answer my questions. AI ends all that. You just ask the question in plain English and the AI will scan the entire Internet and give you an answer in plain English.
This is fundamentally changing the way we get information. Google used to lead us to the website links to find the information we needed. AI takes this one step further. It goes to the websites to get the information, finds the answers and then presents the answer to us without us ever needing to visit the actual websites from which the answers came.
This is devastating all the millions of websites that depend on customer traffic, including news websites. Dozens of news companies like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are suing the AI companies for scraping their websites without permission and then selling their news and information to the AI customers.
In some cases, AI companies have signed royalty deals with important content producers like the New York Times. But this is the exception. Over 99 percent of the content AI uses is scraped without any compensation to the content producers.
So how can AI companies pay royalties to the big companies and scrape the smaller companies for free? If the data has value for which royalties are due, then scraping it for free is essentially stealing it.
This becomes particularly glaring given that AI companies are worth hundreds of billions of dollars while content producers are valued at a tiny fraction of that. Apparently stealing content is a lot more lucrative than producing content.
This has got to be resolved in some way. Music streaming platforms pay tens of thousands of artists more than $100,000 a year in royalty payments. A similar system needs to be set up for content producers. When someone’s content is used by AI, then that person should get a royalty micropayment.
Given the awesome computing power of AI, this is technically possible. The AI knows which websites it uses to produce its answers. Those websites should get paid a royalty micropayment. If not, there will be no money to be made producing content and content will dry up. AI will just be regurgitating AI in an endless superficial echo chamber.
There’s another huge downside of AI. It is the biggest power hog in the history of humanity.
This is ironic. In the early days of the Internet, online news was promoted as being environmentally friendly compared to newspapers, which were printed on paper.
Nevermind that 70 percent of newsprint is recycled (AI gave me this answer too.) AI is supposed to double the demand for electricity by 2030. This comes after a decade of declining demand for electricity because of efficiencies such as LED light bulbs and better home insulation.
Double the demand. Digest that fact. (AI gave me the answer.) This dovetails with the estimate that the new Madison Amazon data center will double the demand for electricity within the Entergy Mississippi grid.
Entergy Mississippi will have to spend three billion dollars meeting that demand. Guess who pays for that? All the residential customers. Meanwhile, Amazon gets a severely discounted top secret rate. It will be one of the biggest transfers of wealth in Mississippi history: from average Mississippi households (20 percent of which are in poverty) to Big Tech and utility companies and their shareholders. Expect your energy bill to double over the next five years.
Aside from giving you a quick answer to any question in the world, AI is great at producing funny memes. For instance, for July 4, I attached a picture of my wife and told AI to create an image of her dressed in a July 4 costume grilling hamburgers. It produced a perfect image in seconds which I then texted to friends and family.
So I asked Perplexity AI (my favorite and I use all of them): “Using AI, I made a July 4 meme of my wife grilling hamburgers in a July 4 costume. If she were grilling on an electric stove, how many chambers could she grill using the same amount of electricity as it took to produce the meme?”
Within a second Perplexity gave me the following answer. I could cook a quarter of a burger.
Then I asked Perplexity AI about a four minute video. It responded:
“Electricity Usage: AI-Generated 4-Minute Video Meme vs. Grilling Hamburgers
“1. Electricity Used to Generate a 4-Minute AI Video Meme
“A 4-minute video at 30 frames per second contains approximately 7,200 frames.
“If generating one AI image uses about 0.011 kWh, then producing a 4-minute AI video would use 79.2 kWh of electricity.
“2. Electricity Needed to Grill One Hamburger
“Grilling one hamburger on an electric stove takes about 0.25 kWh (assuming 10 minutes per burger).
“3. How Many Hamburgers Could Be Grilled?
“With 79.2 kWh, you could grill about 317 hamburgers on an electric stove.
“The electricity required to generate a 4-minute AI video meme is enough to grill roughly 317 hamburgers on an electric stove. Video generation with AI is significantly more energy-intensive than creating a single image, highlighting the substantial difference in electricity use between these digital and culinary activities.”
You see the problem here. Producing funny meme videos of your friends and family will become a national pastime. Electricity usage will explode. Now that the Big Tech companies have negotiated dozens of exploitative deals for subsidized electricity, the cost is going to be borne by the average residential homeowner’s electricity bill. This will be a massive national problem.
Meanwhile, without royalty payments to content producers, quality content will wither to nothing. We will become a nation of morons producing silly fake video memes with huge power bills. Or maybe quantum computing will save the day and we will become a nation of empty useless data centers. Welcome to the future.
