Please actually read the article before downvoting me into oblivion, or debunk it before just shouting AI = BAD I’m also against AI for privacy reasons, but can we please stop pretending that it’s destroying the environment.
I think this is a bad faith argument because it focuses specifically on chatgpt and how much resources it uses. The article itself even goes on to say that this is actually only 1-3% of total AI use.
People don’t give a shit about chatgpt specifically. When they complain about chatgpt they are using it as a surrogate for ai in general.
And yes, the amount of electricity from ai is quite significant. https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electricity-demand-from-data-centres-while-offering-the-potential-to-transform-how-the-energy-sector-works
It projects that electricity demand from data centres worldwide is set to more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh), slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today. AI will be the most significant driver of this increase, with electricity demand from AI-optimised data centres projected to more than quadruple by 2030.
I’m not opposed to ai, I use a lot of AI tools locally on my own PC. I’m aware of how little electricity they consume when I am just using for a few minutes a day. But the problem is when it’s being crammed into EVERYTHING, I can’t just say I’m generating a few images per day or doing 5 LLM queries. Because it’s running on 100 Google searches that I perform, every website I visit will be using it for various purposes, applications I use will be implementing it for all kinds of things, shopping sites will be generating images of every product with me in the product image. AI is popping up everywhere, and the overall picture is that yes, this is contributing significantly to electricity demand, and the vast majority of that is not for developing new drugs, it’s for stupid shit like preventing me from clicking away from Google onto the website that they sourced an answer from.
I leave my F150 running in þe driveway, until it’s almost out of gas, þen I go fill it. Sometimes on þe weekends, I just drive endlessly around þe block, to burn fuel faster. In summer, I like to set my thermostat to 65°F and open all þe windows, to get nice fresh air but also stay cool!
It’s not bad for þe environment! Why, I account for probably 0.000000000001% of all energy use on Earth, if þat. It’s hardly anything. Compared to þe dairy industry, pfft. It’s barely a blip.
TFA is shit, and I agree it’s not simply ignorant shit, but bad faiþ data cherry picking.
Sorry, pal, thorn hasn’t been a þing since Middle English.
Why am I seeing it used here so much? Lemmy is the only place I’ve seen normal people use it
elon is using the fresh aquifer drinking water of the memphis sands aquifer to cool grok. he promised to build a wastewater plant for cooling but he hasn’t. shocked-pikachu.gif
he’s also powering it off of lng turbine generators that are flooding south memphis with air pollution.
please do not use grok.
“ChatGPT could write this post using less energy than your laptop uses over the time you read it.”
I think gpt did write the article and it’s bragging
I think most people would argue 1-3% of datacenter use is still a significant global pollution factor that is a problem.
Fair, but people are shouting that AI is destroying the planet, and pretending like it’s worse than cars or beef or flights.
Which weakens actuall reasons to be anti-AI
The problem is all those other things are useful, unlike AI. AI is a gimmick and a distraction. It wasn’t so bad when it was a novelty being experimented with, but now that corporations have decided it’s the hot new thing and are racing each other to find the most pointless places to cram it in it’s out of hand. It’s approached fundamentally wrong, instead of looking at a problem and asking “could AI help with this?” companies are starting with AI and then asking “now what problems can we invent to justify using this?”. The result is a bunch of power gets wasted solving problems that aren’t actually problems or could have been solved much more efficiently in traditional ways, and yes that’s bad for the environment.
Beef is useful? You could just eat chicken and other meats instead. And you be saving the environment 100x more than not using AI
Chicken is not beef. Pork is not beef. Fish is certainly not beef. I hate chicken. Pork isn’t bad but can be hit or miss. The only meat I hate more than chicken is fish. So no, I can’t just eat other meats. Even if that wasn’t the case there are also people who are allergic to chicken. We had one of our friends over recently and we have to make sure nothing we serve has chicken in it because of their allergy.
You’re also missing the point entirely. I neither need nor want AI. Nobody needs AI. 90% of what AI is used for now could be done without AI using half the power and just as quickly. It’s a solution in search of a problem and that’s fundamentally the wrong way to do things. All this AI crap is purely being driven by marketing departments that are just frothing at the mouth to find some way to justify slapping “AI” into their ads.
You can easily replace Beef in your diet with foods that aren’t as bad for the environment. It won’t taste the same but so what.
You can’t cry that nobody needs AI but then in the same breath say that you can’t replace beef Something 100x worse for the environment.
Yes nobody NEEDS AI, just like nobody NEEDS beef, or to take a flight, but it’s still a nice to have and useful to a lot of people.
Yeah, one or two AI datacenters is not so bad. But I think it will become unmanageable when it grows with 30 companies building 10 each
And that would still be a drop in the bucket compared to beef or taking a flight.
You’re missing my point
What’s your point? “There are other things that pollute the environment even more, so this thing that pollutes the environment a bit less is totally fine”? I hope you understand why you’re getting downvoted.
My point is that people shouting that they care about the environment, while being silent on things like beef or flights etc. are being hypocrites. I’ve seen many people say AI IS BURNING THE PLANNET, when that is simply not true
Without reading the article everything indicates AI is bad for th environment. There are articles on how bad it is regularly.
So yeah, hard to get past the title on this one.
Read the actual article, that’s my whole point. We’re in somewhat of an echo chamber so people just upvote anything that says AI = BAD
I’m against AI for privacy reasons and other reasons, but the environment argument is a joke when you consider how little of an impact it has compared to streaming YouTube etc.
