[I literally had this thought in the shower this morning so please don’t gatekeep me lol.]
If AI was something everyone wanted or needed, it wouldn’t be constantly shoved your face by every product. People would just use it.
Imagine if printers were new and every piece of software was like “Hey, I can put this on paper for you” every time you typed a word. That would be insane. Printing is a need, and when you need to print, you just print.
The Internet was pushed on everyone. AOL and all other ISPs would mail CDs to everyone completely unsolicited. You’d buy a new PC and there would be a link to AOL on the desktop.
You use Google despite no human verification. Yahoo used to function based on human curated lists.
I did the math and posted it on Lemmy. The environmental footprint of AI is big but actually less than the cost to develop a new 3d game ( of which hundreds come out every year). Using AI is the same energy as playing a 3d game.
I see people pointing fingers at data centers the same as car riders looking at the large diesel smoke coming out of a bus and assuming buses are a big pollution source. There are 100M active Fortnite players. An average gaming PC uses 400w. That means Fortnite players alone use 40,000,000,000 watts.
It is a problem because it’s like now everyone is playing 3d games all the time instead of only on their off time.
Are you 15? If so, you might read this and believe the above is true. Those of us elderly folks who lived through the 80s and 90s laugh at this AI shill propaganda.
They “would mail CDs to everyone completely unsolicited” - yeah, that was called advertising, because there was huge consumer demand and a race to be the company to meet that demand. AOL sent CDs (incredibly inexpensive to manufacture) as advertising hoping consumers would choose AOL instead of the competition, by making AOL the easiest choice - consumers already had the required software (software distribution was a challenge in this time before internet was ubiquitous).
The dot com boom was not the claim of a new technology being pushed onto consumers, the dot com boom was the opposite - a new technology existed and consumers were embracing it, and many companies speculated on how to gain ownership of markets as they shifted online. (The following bust was fueled by over-ambitious speculation on scales and timeframes.)
Anyway, AOL mailing CDs was late in the era, it was much better when they were mailing floppy disks we could reuse.
Dude. I’m not only old but I worked for Vint Cerf and later was president of one of the companies mass mailing CD’s to everyone. I ran so many commercials on TV that I had a customer call up and say, “please stop!” Sports stadiums were named after ISPs. Road names were changed to names of ISPs. It was a massive advertising push because people were buying. The only thing that has outstripped Internet adoption rates is AI adoption rates which is why there’s an even bigger advertising push.
I have tried AI but don’t generally use it. I don’t use Facebook either. But I’m not going to pretend people don’t use Facebook because I don’t like it and don’t use it.
This doesn’t add up though. Fortnite’s player base is only about 10% PC, and the system requirements are pretty modest. It’ll even run on Intel integrated graphics, according to the minimum requirements from Epic.
There’s even a modest chunk (~6%) on Nintendo switch, which, according to Nintendo, draws about 7 watts when playing a game in TV mode.
Not to mention, the true resource cost of an AI comes from training. Sure, it costs about as much processing and power as a video game to prompt a trained AI. I can believe that. However it takes many thousands of times as much power and processing to train one, and we aren’t even close to halfway through training any general-llm model to the point of being actually useful.
I referenced training above. Training cost is less than developer costs. Thousands of artists on high end PCs in office space use more energy than a data center. But no one notices because people are spread out across offices.
I didn’t realize Fortnite was played mainly on other platforms!
PlayStation 42.2% Xbox 28.8% Nintendo Switch 12% PC 11% Mobile (iOS, Android) 6%
https://millionmilestech.com/fortnite-user/#%3A~%3Atext=continue+reading+below.-%2CFortnite+Player+Count%2C(as+of+October+2023).
PS5, Xbox are both 200+ watts.
So assuming Mobile and Nintendo Switch power use is 0, and all PCs only use 200 watts, that’s still 8,000,000,000 watts. For 1 game.
Sure companies were excited to promote it, but it was primarily adopted because of a very large amount of people being excited about it.
I use DuckDuckGo to find sources, not answers. I won’t use them again if they’re trash. They’re accountable for their content.
Human curated lists are still very helpful. In a sense, that was the value of Reddit.
I’ll take your word for it.
A very large amount of people are excited by AI. People were excited by pet rocks.
DuckDuck is Bing with privacy. When you get a Google AI summary it lists links to read the source.
The push:excitement ratio was different for the early internet than for ai.
Using those sources would verify the Google summary. For me, it is an unnecessary step. I can just go read the sources directly and skip the summary since I’ll need to read them anyway to verify the summary.
Sounds like you forgot to consider the energy cost of developing each AI model. Developing and maintaining a model is vastly more energy intense than 3d game dev. Keep in mind that you can ship a 3d game and ramp down gpu use for dev. But an AI model has to be constantly updated, mostly by completely retraining. Also, noone was clamoring to build massive data centers just to develope one game. Yet they are for one model.
The Internet was 30 years old by the time AOL was sending CDs (even floppies) to people.
AI was around for 50 years old before Copilot invaded everything.
Fair point. Though I would then argue it’s the World Wide Web that was being pushed by AOL in the same way that it’s LLMs that are being pushed today.