AI Ethics and Tools: ID Links 9/2/25

As I read online, I bookmark resources I find interesting and useful. I share these links about once a month here on my blog. This post includes links related to AI ethics and energy use as well as some AI image and video generation tools.

AI ethics and energy use

Is Any AI Use Ethical? – Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Wes Fryer shares his thoughts on differing views of ethics and AI. Wes is not ethically opposed to all AI, but that doesn’t mean he supports all AI use blindly either. He shares his thoughts on opposing techno-fascism and concerns about unethical uses of AI without rejecting AI entirely.

I am convinced AI technologies present transformative capabilities as a “cognitive force multiplier,” and have willingly drank a healthy portion of the “AI Kool-Aid” and “AI hype cycle.” I’ve said and still believe that AI represents a transformative leap forward in our shared human history of communication as well as information economy / third wave work. At this point, I am not and do not want to be an “AI conscientious objector,” refusing to voluntarily use it in all contexts. I am an advocate for its ethical and beneficial uses, and plan to remain one.
—Wes Fryer

Creating AI Art Responsibly: How to Navigate AI Legal Risks

These recommendations are a good starting point for thinking about how to use AI images and video ethically and to reduce your risk.

Set Clear AI Use Guidelines
Choose Tools That Protect You
Be Careful What You Prompt
Use Approved References
Review Before Release
Seek Expert Guidance, Mitigate AI Legal Risks
—Onward Search blog

Our approach to energy innovation and AI’s environmental footprint

Google published a technical report on the environmental impact of AI, including calculating the cost of training models (not just individual queries). They reported energy use much lower than many earlier estimates, partly due to improvements in efficiency.

Over a 12-month period, while delivering higher-quality responses, the median energy consumption and carbon footprint per Gemini Apps text prompt decreased by factors of 33x and 44x, respectively. Based on our recent analysis, we found that our work on efficiency is proving effective and the energy consumed per median prompt is equivalent to watching television for less than nine seconds.
—Ben Gomes

AI image and video generation tools

Ideogram Character

This is another tool I’m adding to my list to test out. Give Ideogram a single reference image and then generate multiple remixed images. In the demo, I notice that the expressions don’t seem to change much, so that might be a limitation. The basic character creation is free, with additional features for more precise editing on their paid subscription plan.

WaveSpeedAI

WaveSpeed gives you access to multiple different image and video generation tools by paying for credits based on what you actually use. This looks like a promising option to test out tools or generate a few videos without committing to a larger subscription.

MeiGen-AI/InfiniteTalk

MeiGen-AI/InfiniteTalk is an open source AI video generation tool that supports image-to-video and video-to-video generation. This tool can create longer video clips, not just the 5-10 seconds of many other tools. It’s open source, so this link goes to the Github for the project with instructions to install it locally. For a local model, the results look very promising. Installing and running it will take some technical proficiency though.