Back to It After All these Year

Back to blogging after almost eight years of hiatus.  This is still a STEM blog with commentary, opinion, and life lessons.

I am not concerned whether the blog gets read or not; I am just keeping up with online journaling of specific thoughts while I can.

On another note,  My Pattern was to find images on the internet for the article's color and background. With AI, things are a little different. The image here is AI generated, which does save an artist to do something more productive, but the image is not free.  There is a lot CPU time and energy that goes into that image.  Here is what Copilot has siad to generate this image.

Estimating the energy required to generate the last image depends on the computational resources used by the AI model. Here’s a breakdown:

Typical Energy Use for AI Image Generation

• Model Type: Large diffusion-based models (like Stable Diffusion or similar) usually run on GPUs.
• Compute Time: Generating a single high-resolution image (portrait orientation, detailed fantasy scene) typically takes 20–60 seconds on a high-end GPU.
• GPU Power Draw: A modern GPU (e.g., NVIDIA A100 or RTX 4090) consumes about 250–400 watts during inference.

Approximate Energy Calculation

• Assume 45 seconds generation time and 300 W power draw:

  $$\text{Energy}=\text{Power}\times \text{Time}=300\text{ W}\times 45\text{ s}=\mathrm{13,500}\text{ J}\approx 0.0038\text{ kWh}$$

Context

• 0.0038 kWh is roughly the energy to power a LED bulb for about 4 hours.
• Carbon footprint: Around 1.5 grams of CO₂, depending on the electricity source.

The cost to generate the last image can be estimated based on the energy consumption we calculated earlier:

• Energy used: ~0.0038 kWh
• Average U.S. electricity cost: about $0.15 per kWh

$$\text{Cost} = 0.0038 \text{ kWh} \times \$0.15/\text{kWh} \approx \$0.00057$$

Estimated Cost

About $0.0006 (less than one-tenth of a cent) per image.

On average I go through about 5 iteration of an image before I am ok with using it.

At a total cost of half a penny, but burning an LED bulb for 20 hours.