Yes, blame the consumers yet again when we all know corporations are the biggest climate offenders.
Not really, this is more like an obvious statement like "certain activities like sports may cause you to burn twice the calories. Yeah, doh.
When you do 0 AI prompts, they all cause the same amount of emissions, which is 0.
Also true: When you do 0 AI prompts, they all cause the same amount of emissions, which is 999999999 gigajoules.
Is it just me or is that stupid way to measure consuming computing power? The CPUs themselves doing computations do not produce any pollutants (unless you calculate how much of that is created during manufacturing ang logistics, which I doubt). It’s the (without question stupidly large) energy consumption which might, but big players are at least greenwashing their actions by using renewable energy more and more.
Why not create comparison like “generating 1000 words of your fanfiction consumes as much energy as you do all day” or something more easily to compare.
Why not create comparison like “generating 1000 words of your fanfiction consumes as much energy as you do all day” or something more easily to compare.
Because its still bullshit. The bulk of the utilization of these LLMs isn’t going to your 1000 word Princess Leia/Dianna Troy lesbian romance. They’re going to some call center in the Philippines blowing up your cell with automated voice-to-text phone calls and a bargain basement Netflix animation studio experimenting with AI generated children’s cartoons.
Once again, we have a giant Business Factory spewing out enormous plums of waste to produce things nobody asked for. Then we’re getting an Op-Ed from some know-nothing hack on the greenwashing beat to tell their readers “Um, aktuly, these skyrocketing emissions are because you asked Alexa to add kidney beans to your shopping list.” And I will put even money odds on this Op-Ed, itself, being AI generated.
Because its still bullshit.
Obviously. But I have no context on how much my actions create co2 in the first place. I assume driving a car generates a majority of it, or maybe heating the house, but I still don’t have any clue how many kilograms that might be. But what I do know is how many kilowatts my house consumes electricity and at least roughly how much our appliances use, so if you want to try and blame me for consuming precious resources by generating text or watching a video at least give me an measurement I can easily comprehend.
FWIW, a short query to a typical sized LLM takes about 1Wh of energy, there lots of variance on how big the model you are using and how long the input and outputs are but thats the correct order of magnitude. 1Wh is the amount of energy consumed by a 1kW electric kettle in 3.6 seconds or a 2kW hairdryer in 1.8 seconds.
if you assume that energy was produced in a coal power plant (the worst for co2 emissions) then it makes around 0.3g of co2 emissions, which is the equivalent of burning about one droplet of gasoline.
Recycling 2: Electric Bugaloo
Why not create comparison like “generating 1000 words of your fanfiction consumes as much energy as you do all day” or something more easily to compare.
Considering that you can generate 1000 words in a single prompt to ChatGPT, the energy to do that would be about 0.3Wh.
That’s about as much energy as a typical desktop would use in about 8 seconds while browsing the fediverse (assuming a desktop consuming energy at a rate of ~150W).
Or, on the other end of the spectrum, if you’re browsing the fediverse on Voyager with a smartphone consuming energy at a rate of 2W, then that would be about 9 minutes of browsing the fediverse (4.5 minutes if using a regular browser app in my case since it bumped up the energy usage to ~4W).
Because it really doesn’t. For most tasks, it would require more human energy to do the work than an LLM, just because we are much slower at it than an AI. I mean, humans operate at around 80 W just by existing (basal metabolic rate).
If the AI is powered by renewables, it’s cleaner than humans. If it’s powered by fossil fuels, it’s likely much worse (though I haven’t run the calculations).
Now obviously, this presumes that the output of an AI is even valuable at all, which is often not the case.
I’m somewhat in agreement I think. Is it really me talking to ChatGPT about the Holographic Theory in quantum mechanics, and why the Mac version of Brother’s P-Touch software is such trash, that are destroying the environment? Or is it the soulless corporate CEOs laying off thousands of customer service reps in order to replace them with AI bots, that are really consuming all the energy? Not to mention all the lives they have directly and more immediately destroyed with their decisions.
What a stat.
Sometimes i go 50 times further then other times.
It kinda depends on where i am going.
Some llms have a deepsearch feature where it goes trough 400+ webpages taking multiple minutes. But usually i just need it to rewrite part of an email.
Wow tokens exist.
See i fit that in 3 words.
Think of the saved CO2 compared to writing an entire article!
Does this also apply to AI models I run locally on my computer?
That’s a good question no one else seems to be asking. When you run local prompts, you’re using more battery on your laptop or power from your PSU, but both of those are limited by their relatively small power consumption (when compared to server farms). Therefore, it could be likened to encoding heavy video or exporting complex blender models. Are you using more electricity? Yes. Is it city-eroding amounts more? Not even close.
No they are magically free.
/s
I think most people have decided they like using AI more than they care about climate change
Sometimes i use ai to analyze spreadsheet data for me and spit out an excel sheet with the answers. It says “thinking” for like 10 mins, and i can just imagine some GPUs on fire in a datacenter somewhere…
This headline irritates me. If it was a person, I’d tell it to fuck off for assuming I use AI.
That’s cool. Not my problem to solve.
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Always remember to say please and thank you
Lemmy wants me to believe that AI is the danger for climate change. This is like drinking through paper straw while the pollution comes from mega-factories who dump their waste in the river.
So AI is the problem… huh… and not the thousands of missiles dropped in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and the Occupied Terrorist Zionazi Land.
Cool I guess, AI Bad!
Meh, whataboutism.
