In the late 2000s there was a push by a lot of businesses to not print emails and people use to add a ‘Please consider this environment before printing this email.’
Considering how bad LLMs/‘ai’ are with power consumption and water usage a new useless tag email footer should be made.
I mean the difference between pointing out the environmental impacts of AI compared to the environmental impacts of heating/air conditioning, industry, transportation etc. is there’s useful output from one and the other just creates low quality slop.
Most of the use of AI right now is entirely pointless. It exists purely because of the AI bubble and eventually companies won’t be burning queries on annoying sales chat bots that the user isn’t even interacting with or inaccurate search result summaries that you can’t reasonably turn off
a) many people swear by it - is it so useless then? it’s a personal question, and the answer is not the same for everyone. ChatGPT is one of the most downloaded apps worldwide, so to assume that all of those people do not gain something from it cannot be right. b) people do a lot of useless things that all have a climate cost, but noone bats an eye when someone says they watched 2 hours of 4k video, which uses a lot more ressources than Chatbots. c) chatbots that noone interacts with do not consume resources in a meaningful way, since you have to make a request for that - the greeting will be hardcoded in 99% of cases. d) i agree that the amount of VC money inflates AI usage, but VC money does this with everything: dotcom bubble, 2008 crash (housing bubble), crypto bubble, nft bubble… the difference here is that people actually have personal use scenarios, regardless of VC money. e) I agree that opt-in should be the default, i’m no fan of google’s bot, but i actually just don’t use google, i use mullvad leta for most things, and i’m waiting for the rollout of the european search index that qwant and ecosia created - it went live in france recently and i’m excited to try it out when it starts here!
You know what’s funny? i don’t even use ChatGPT, i rely on locally running models - and i’m pretty sure my GPU is less efficient than the setup in a data center.