it's fine as a hobby gimmick, I suppose.

I do want to clarify that my position is still that 90+% of Stable Diffusion/Flux hobbyists should be because the scene is overrun with chuds, grifters, pedophiles, and people who are just too cringe. But the tech itself is cool and relatively innocuous at a hobbyist scale.

It's still a problem on the corpo scale that is stoking and profiting from the hype wave.

Yeah, I think it's basically a problem of scale and induced demand: one image generated with a hobbyist setup takes a few seconds to a few minutes depending on the model and GPU, is pretty comparable in energy usage to using that machine for more mundane rendering tasks for the same amount of time, and is probably not meaningfully distinct from how much energy would be used over the hours that making it with more traditional digital methods would use; the problem is that having such a fast and convenient way of producing images induces a demand for more of them so it's not just one image it's dozens or hundreds or thousands of them all but one or two of which will get thrown out. At the corporate scale it's technically more efficient per image, but it scales even further and tries to draw in more people so now it's many millions upon millions of images and because it's an uncontrollable remote server instance instead of the comparatively sophisticated tools that a local machine can run every single one of those images is useless noise.

I hate the corporate shit so much. It's just all bad, all the time, at a huge cost, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. At least with the hobbyist stuff there's at least something interesting and potentially useful to it among all the bad.