The Gaming Den

Hey guys - I'm an oldtimer here (SunTzuWarmaster) and cannot reset my account (lol).

I've recently gained early access to an AI art tool. Back in the day (a decade ago, lol), the AwetomeTome had a primary problem that it lacked good art. I kinda stopped playing for a bit as I got my PhD in AI (I'm not an artist, lol). That said, when I finally have access to a good AI art tool - I'm looking to use my evenings/breaks making some art for a bit. Its fun. I enjoy it.

The AI art tools work best when there is relatively extensive text, so they naturally lend themselves to a task like "illustrate this monster manual" which already has text descriptions.

So, um, anyone need something art-ed? Is someone the current keeper of the AwesomeTome? Is this the right thing, or has everyone moved onto 5E or whatever now?

Sample - https://i.mj.run/7908126c-1068-4ed6-ab9 ... grid_0.png
https://i.mj.run/d7c762bf-3cd8-47f3-b24 ... grid_0.png

FYI - is me - search.php?author_id=182&sr=posts

It's creepy and unnerving. But it's also free and easy to use! I dig it! I should plug in some Pokemon stuff sometimes, I've noticed that these Art AI things tend to do well with licensed characters.

Welcome back! We kept your barrel of cocks warm, so here you go, start suckin!

That art actually looks kinda cool. I've seen some other art AIs and their results tend to be mashing elements pulled from other images with some terrible attempt to blend the edges together. That stuff actually looks coherent. You might have to ask it for a hundred images and filter out the top twenty, but that's still an order of magnitude faster than commissioning a human.

I think the larger obstacle to getting AwesomeTome going again is that IMOI has been pretty dead other than Koumei and Wiseman's monsters. You've got an uphill battle to rustle up some talent.

Since you're asking, I have a (very minor) need for a black-and-white lineart first person view of an oarsman on a slave galley, ideally including an overseer using a whip.

Welcome back. We still play Tome games, and create stuff for them, although content has slowed down naturally as a result of things already having been created. One of the former key members of the Tome stuff, and indeed more vocal members of the Den, has left - to the point of having his name erased and declaring everything can be used and modified without attribution because he doesn't want anything to do with the site. As such, weird AI art is always welcome, but there isn't really anyone in charge to declare parameters or priorities. Maybe whoever updates the pdf (assuming this is a thing that happens) could give guidelines on dimensions.

We also have people working on their own systems and things, and a little more discussion of other games, though there isn't much interest in 5th Edition D&D, what with that barely being a ruleset.

I have one question: what is the server load and carbon footprint of this tool? I've heard both tend to be quite big for neural networks and machine learning tools.

"server load and carbon footprint of this tool" - I suspect that this is highly dependent on usage, but, as a person in this field, the environmental effect is generally largely overblown.
Do you think of the processing power and carbon footprint for your computer? My lab has ~8 computers worth of carbon footprint and runs a few dozen AI experiments per week. That's kind of a lot for a single person/computer (8 computers being more than one), but WAY less than any real industrial application.
To put it in perspective, I'm pretty sure the AI server in the lab uses less daily power than a nailgun (which is powered by a diesel generator at the construction site) and serves about a dozen projects. The newsmedia gets it somewhat wrong when they say "look at this power consumption of this tool! Its using so much power!" when lots of people are using it because it would be akin to taking ALL the nailguns and adding them together and then reporting on the power usage of "Nailgun" as a single object.
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in specific regards to MidJourney - a P100 (most expensive) GPU costs $9000 to rent for the year (including power), which is 526K minutes. Each image generation is about a minute of GPU time and the maximum generation rate is about 5 minutes per image. So a "full bore" subscription would be ~280 images/day (24/7 operations baby!). This would be a maximum individual footprint of $5/day. Given that you have to sleep, the price of the $30/month subscription seems about right . Something like $10-15/month in total power/hardware impact?
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If you spend an hour doing Midjourney instead of a 15 minute drive to the gym, this would be a net-positive carbon footprint. Somewhat obviously if you did this while driving, it would be net negative .
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Hi Koumei! Any chance you can reset SunTzuWarmaster?

Thanks for the info, that was very informative. I was lead to believe they involved more than that, but as you said, media has overblown these things.

As for resetting, I'm not actually a mod. My post-rate and title suggest way more importance than I actually have.

I've created ~250 images at this point, which would be $5 of total costs (assuming they use the fanciest GPUs), with something like $2 of power costs? I'm on track to be in/around "10 loads of laundry" worth of power by the end of the month. I'm not saying there's 0 footprint, but its easily in the "a single solar panel will have supported all my usage" situation. Disclosure: my house was solar powered until I got an electric car (used Nissan Leaf). The additional power demands of the Leaf meant I was net-0 anymore. If you are a CA business in the business of selling power/GPU-time, you should basically buy as many solar panels as you possibly can.

If you're interested in getting your old account fiddled with, you could try posting in the About/Welcome forum. Zherog seems to notice posts there faster than stuff buried in actual content. I'm not sure that there's much they can do, though. There's a bunch of people who were around for the previous forum reset that are on new accounts now.