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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
The shipping industry emits a billion tons of CO~2~e per year. Training a model emits... maybe a thousand? An impact that could be offset by reducing Chinese imports by 0.0001%. Or arbitrarily limited by strong-arming the very few companies involved. DeepSeek knocked off a few orders of magnitude and R1 seems to work, as well as any of these things work.
But some people don't really give a shit about the electricity involved - it's just a negative for them to latch onto.
Now, it is a problem locally, where datacenters turn power straight into heat, as fast as they can manage. Anything like a tiny sliver of the global shipping industry becomes noticeable when it's concentrated in one building within range of a commute.