This is an idea I’ve been toying with for a bit. There is a ton of media that includes unimportant information that doesn’t need to be stored pixel perfect. Storing large portions of the image data as text will save substantial amounts of storage, and as the reality of on-device image generation becoming commonplace sets in digital memories will become the main way people capture the world around them. I think this will inevitably be the next form of media capture (photography and video), not replacing other methods/ formats, but I could see things like phone cameras having saving images as digital memories set to default to save on storage.
That makes even less sense, the CPU/GPU usage would be insane, and if used in large scale, would quickly get up there with crypto mining in terms of energy use, and that is already a big problem for the environment.
Storage of large files on the other hand needs relatively little energy to keep on a harddrive.