Eh I disagree with the power usage point, specifically. Don’t listen to Altman lie through his teeth; generation and training should be dirt cheap.

See the recent Z Image, which was trained on a shoestring budget and costs basically nothing to run: https://arxiv.org/html/2511.22699v2

The task energy per image is less than what it took for me to type out this comment.

As for if we “need” it, yeah, that’s a good point and what I was curious about.

But then again… I don’t get why people use a lot of porn services. As an example, I just don’t see the appeal of OF, yet it’s a colossal enterprise.

As already indicated; energy and water use is not so big. It costs substantially more data center time to store and stream high def film then to generate even hundreds of images. Generation itself is very resource cheap compared to human actors and a film crew.