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People on Lemmy love to cry AI IS BURNING THE PLANNET but have they ever really looked at the numbers?
- 1 kg Beef = 60kg CO2 - source
- 1000km Return flight = 314kg CO2 - source
- 1 Bitcoin transaction = 645kg of CO2 - source
- 1000 AI prompts = 3kg of CO2 - source including training
I'm a strong advocate for privacy, and I myself am Anti generative AI in many ways, but can we please stop shouting that AI IS BRUNING THE PLANNET, it weakens our position to push back at actual issues with AI like privacy.
Here is a detailed breakdown debunking that AI is destroying the planet: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about
By your numbers 1 prompt generates 3g of CO~2~
ChatGPT says they handle 2.5billion prompts per day.
That's 7,500 tonnes of CO~2~ per day from ChatGPT alone. The vast majority of those are completely pointless queries.
Your point is spurious at best and misleading at worst.
I would be curious to compare that to Google search. Some experts estimate Google search and the time spent reviewing the results on your device can be 3-10g of Co2. The Google part alone is maybe .2g per search.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90171268/internet_impact_visualized
Here they estimated in 2018 that just rendering front page cost 300 tons a minute, so 432,000 tons a day. Just for the front page.
Just to put it in perspective that the Internet itself is not free. It's expensive to power sending all this data around!
Yes, when you go by billions, the numbers quickly add up.
For beef, you can feed 1 KG to 3 people, which creates 60 KG of CO~2~.
If you calculate this for Europe, we'd get about 14900000 tonnes of CO~2~ PER DAY.
So promting, even from the biggest LLM currently on the planet, is still only 1/2000 of eating beef in Europe alone for 1/3 of a single meal.
Your point is misrepresenting even more, and using statistics to blow up the number, while not doing the same calculation for the other parts.
So ChatGPT isn't as polluting as the beef industry, what's your point? We can go on asking for LLMs to make pictures of big tiddy anime girls and the answers to simple questions that it still gets wrong because people eat meat still?
Just like bitcoin and all the other pump and dump cryptos, LLM chatbots created a market that didn't exist before that needlessly adds excess pollution (and to be clear, I agree with OPs primary point that the environmental impact isn't the worst thing about them), and they're trying to force them into every aspect of our lives whether they're suited to it or not.
Highlighting the environmental (and commercial, social and privacy) concerns is one tool to get policy makers to maybe think twice about signing another huge deal to get ChatGPT embedded in yet another part of our lives.
My point?
If you complain the world is burning because of AI but you eat beef, you are contributing >2000 times as much as a non-beef eater who uses AI. Making you a hypocrite who is mad at the wrong things.
Neither AI not beef are a necessity.
It's highlighting hypocrisy. It's asking: do you take this problem seriously, or are you just complaining?
Having LLMs shoved into everything is a serious problem. But it's a problem the way that forced updates and invasion of privacy were already a problem. Fixating on energy use is pretense. It's working backwards to point at the negative externalities of something you've already made conclusions about, as if those factors were relevant to your conclusion. Using that as rhetoric is the nature of bad faith.
This is exactly my point
You're completely missing my point.
Streaming 4k video uses a lot more, should we also critique people who stream video?