this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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This is why "AI" is such a shit term. This is not a general purpose generative model, which is what you (and me) should (and very clearly do) dislike.
This is a model that is designed to operate on a very specific set of data and extract information from it. It was created by people at the University of Cambridge, not one of the big shitty companies. It's not something that you run all the time, it's something you only run when gathering data for research purposes. The model was trained on truly freely available data. No nonconsensual large-scale scraping was used to train this model, so it's free of the ethical concerns typically associated with "AI". Since it's something a research group would run by themselves on a single (albeit very powerful) machine, it has very modest power requirements.
Models like this have been around for at least 15 years in the research space, and they don't deserve your ire. It's one of the truly good uses of ML.
If you want more details on the system, it's all open source and can be found here: https://github.com/ucam-eo/tessera
EDIT: Please don't take this as me trying to defend LLMs and image generators. I fucking hate LLMs and image generators. People at my workplace have described me as "the anti-AI guy" because I really am. I think almost all of the ML products made by OpenAI, Anthropic, and others are unethical and also just shit.
You're completely right about the technicalities, and the problem is that this is (or at least sure feels like!) part of a marketing push. "AI" to the general public is the LLM trash, but people keep getting beaten over the head with articles like the one OP posted... And those articles conflate text/image generation with things that are barely related.
Yeah, it's so fucking frustrating. I felt conflicted writing this because I don't want to reduce anyone's resistance to the garbage being pushed by the big corpos. We should be saying "no" as strongly as possible at every encroachment. I just also don't want essential research to also take the blow. A lot of environmental research benefits from satellite imagery, and anything we can do to glean more information from that is a good thing.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You can't really expect the average person to learn the distinction between the good and the bad here. You can try to educate folks, but people already have enough shit on their plates as it is.