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.
🏞 Please consider the environment before issuing a return-to-office mandate
This! There are no reason go back to office for some professions like programmers, managers, etc
I don’t think regular people really understand the power needed for AI. It’s often taught that we just have it. But not where it comes from.
True, but most people don’t realise how little not printing an email ‘helped’ the environment.
It would have been significant if a lot of people did it.
I’m doing my part. Can’t remember the last time I had to print anything.
People keep telling us that ai energy use is very low, but at the same time, companies keep building more and more giant power hungry datacenters. Something simply doesn’t add up.
Sure, a small local model can generate text at low power usage, but how useful will that text be, and how many people will actually use it? What I see is people constantly moving to the newest, greatest model, and using it for more and more things, processing more and more tokens. Always more and more.
Each datacenter is set to handle millions of users, so it concentrates all the little requests into very few physical locations.
The tech industry further amplifies things with ambient LLM invocation. You do a random google search, it implicitly does an LLM unasked. When a user is using an LLM enabled code editor, it’s making LLM requests every few seconds of typing to drive the autocomplete suggestions. Often it has to submit a new LLM request before the old one even completed because the user typed more while the LLM was chewing on the previous input.
So each LLM invocation may be reasonable, but they are being concentrated impact wise into very few places and invocations are amplified by tech industry being overly aggressive about overuse for the sake of 'ambient magic.
I wonder how the power usage of running an LLM locally compares to playing a modern game at high settings. Can they be very different?
I would compare LLM to bit mining. But I’m not an expert
This is the main reason I am reticent about using ai. I can get around its funtional limitations but I need to know they have brought the energy usage down.
It’s not that bad when it’s just you fucking around having it write fanfics instead of doing something more taxing, like playing an AAA video game or, idk, run a microwave or whatever it is normies do. Training a model is very taxing, but running them isn’t and the opportunity cost might even be net positive if you tend to use your gpu a lot.
It becomes more of a problem when everyone is doing it when it’s not needed, like reading and writing emails. There’s no net positive, it’s a very large scale usage, and brains are a hell of a lot more efficient at it. This use case has gotta be one of the dumbest imaginable, all while making people legitimately dumber using it over time.
oh you are talking locally I think. I play games on my steamdeck as my laptop could not handle it at all.
Yup, and the deck can do stuff at an astounding low wattage, like 3W to 15W range. Meanwhile there’s gpus that can run at like 400W-800W, like when people used to use two 1080s SLI. I always found it crazy when I saw a guy running a system burning as much electricity as a weak microwave just to play a game, lol. Kept his house warm, tho.
You can run one on your PC locally so you know how much power it is consuming
I already stress my laptop with what I do so I doubt I will do that anytime soon. I tend to use pretty old hardware though. 5 year plus. honestly closer to 10.
Can’t remember the last time my hardware was younger than 10 years old 😂…😭
Mines actually just shy. 2017 manufacture.
It’s the same as playing a 3d game. It’s a GPU or GPU equivalent doing the work. It doesn’t matter if you are asking it to summarize an email or play Red Dead Redemption.
I mean if every web search I do is like playing a 3d game then I will stick with web searches. 3d gaming is the most energy intensive thing I do on a computer.
“If everyone is littering, it’s not a big deal if I throw the occasional can on the ground”
I mean, depends on the email. If you spend more time answering yourself than the AI would, you almost certainly emit more green house gasses, used more fresh water and electricity, and burned more calories. Depending on the email, you might have also decreased net happiness generally.
Do we care about the environment or not? Please, oppose datacenters in desserts and stop farming alfalfa where water supplies are low. But your friend using AI to answer an email that could have been a google search is not the problem.
More like, “If I focus on being an asshole to people throwing cans on the ground, I don’t have to stop using my car”
Please consider the environment before sending me an email, seriously, I won’t read it.
Text generation uses hardly any energy at all, though. Most phones do it locally these days. In fact, it likely takes less energy to generate an email in 5 seconds than it would take for you to type it out manually in 5 minutes with the screen on the whole time.
But it’s everywhere now and it’s almost impossible to use mainstream services without it being used. I can just go to Google anymore, type a search query and get a reply without AI bs being used. How long before it’s baked into the GMail compose window and it doesn’t without me wanting to.
Then we stop using it.
I think we need a Rule 34 of open-source programs:
Rule 34: If it exists, there is an open-source version of it
i) If no open-source version exists, it is currently being created
ii) If no open-source version is being created, you must create it yourself
Thanks. You reminded me to turn Gemini off. Did that once and it came back on.
WHO IS USING AI TO RESPOND TO EMAILS? Like, by the time to “craft” the ultimate response, you could have just written the email.
This may be my bias as an engineer (not software, but chemical), there’s not really much faffing about in an email. You just politely respond, or politely make a query. It’s not very long, typically, and even if it is, an LLM isn’t gonna help you.
You don’t have to sugar coat anything unless there’s some fuck up you’re trying to soften. You just go “Hi xyz, could you please clarify when the design temperature is changing here?”.
Wtf is there you can use an LLM for in an email?
I have only used it for software troubleshooting, as it’s quite nifty there, even if it’s information is out of date, it gets versions confused, etc, still gets me out of a bind or spits out random ideas to try.
But emails? Those short form messages, just barely longer than texts?
Are we actually serious? It’s not a report
I don’t know if it would help, but you could also add links to articles about this. You could put hyperlinks behind numbers - like “[see 1, 2, 3, 4…]”.
Here are some if you want to do this: https://www.wired.com/story/new-research-energy-electricity-artificial-intelligence-ai/
https://web.archive.org/web/20240318115424/https://disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-a-data-center-boom/
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-is-revitalizing-the-fossil-fuels
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-ai-power-home-appliances/
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-center-gas-emissions-tech
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/23/arizona-data-centers-navajo-power-aps-srp/
Na, that’s too useful the point is to be virtue signalling
