I feel the same way. I was talking with my mom about AI the other day and she was still on the “it’s not good that AI is trained on stolen images, how it’s making people lazy and taking jobs away from ppl” which is good, but I had to explain to her how much one AI prompt costs in energy and resources, how many people just mindlessly make hundreds of prompts a day for largely stupid shit they don’t need and how AI hallucinates, is actively used by bad actors to spread mis- and disinformation and how it is literally being implemented into search engines everywhere so even if you want to avoid it as a normal person, you may still end up participating in AI prompting every single fucking time you search for anything on Google. She was horrified.
There definitely are some net positives to AI, but currently the negatives outweigh the positives and most people are not using AI responsibly at all. I have little to no respect for people who use AI to make memes or who use it for stupid everyday shit that they could have figured out themselves.
The most dystopian shit I have seen recently was when my boyfriend and I went to watch Weapons in cinema and we got an ad for an AI assistent. The ad is basically this braindead bimbo at a laundry mat deciding to use AI to tell her how to wash her clothes instead of looking at the fucking flips on her clothes and putting two and two together. She literally takes a picture of the flip and has the AI assistent tell her how to do it and then going “thank you so much, I could have never done this without you”.
I fucking laughed in the cinema. Laughed and turned to my boyfriend and said: this is so fucking dystopian, dude.
I feel insane for seeing so many people just mindlessly walking down this path of utter retardation. Even when you tell them how disastrous it is for the planet, it doesn’t compute in their heads because it is not only convenient to have a machine think for you. It’s also addictive.
I’m pretty sure it’s a product of scale, but also, GPT5 is markedly worse. I heard estimates of 40 watt hours for a single medium length response. Napkin math says my motorcycle can travel
about kilometer per single medium length response of GPT5. Now multiply that by how many people are using AI (anyone going online these days), now multiply that by how many times a day each user causes a prompt. Now multiply that by 365 and we have how much power they’re using in a year.
Maybe not an individual prompt, but with how many prompts are made for stupid stuff every day, it will stack up to quite a lot of CO2 in the long run.
Not denying the training of AI is demanding way more energy, but that doesn’t really matter as both the action of manufacturing, training and millions of people using AI amounts to the same bleak picture long term.
Considering how the discussion about environmental protection has only just started to be taken seriously and here they come and dump this newest bomb on humanity, it is absolutely devastating that AI has been allowed to run rampant everywhere.
According to this article, 500.000 AI prompts amounts to the same CO2 outlet as a
round-trip flight from London to New York.
I don’t know how many times a day 500.000 AI prompts are reached, but I’m sure it is more than twice or even thrice. As time moves on it will be much more than that. It will probably outdo the number of actual flights between London and New York in a day. Every day. It will probably also catch up to whatever energy cost it took to train the AI in the first place and surpass it.
Because you know. People need their memes and fake movies and AI therapist chats and meal suggestions and history lessons and a couple of iterations on that book report they can’t be fucked to write. One person can easily end up prompting hundreds of times in a day without even thinking about it. And if everybody starts using AI to think for them at work and at home, it’ll end up being many, many, many flights back and forth between London and New York every day.
I have a hard time believing that article’s guesstimate since Google (who actually runs these data centers and doesn’t have to guess) just published a report stating that the median prompt uses about a quarter of a watt-hour, or the equivalent of running a microwave oven for one second. You’re absolutely right that flights use an unconscionable amount of energy. Perhaps your advocacy time would be much better spent fighting against that.
Sam Altman, or whatever fuck his name is, asked users to stop saying please and thank you to chatgpt because it was costing the company millions. Please and thank you are the less power hungry questions chatgpt gets. And its costing chatgpt millions. Probably 10s of millions of dollars if the CEO made a public comment about it.
You’re right training is hella power hungry, but even using gen ai has heavy power costs
I feel the same way. I was talking with my mom about AI the other day and she was still on the “it’s not good that AI is trained on stolen images, how it’s making people lazy and taking jobs away from ppl” which is good, but I had to explain to her how much one AI prompt costs in energy and resources, how many people just mindlessly make hundreds of prompts a day for largely stupid shit they don’t need and how AI hallucinates, is actively used by bad actors to spread mis- and disinformation and how it is literally being implemented into search engines everywhere so even if you want to avoid it as a normal person, you may still end up participating in AI prompting every single fucking time you search for anything on Google. She was horrified.
There definitely are some net positives to AI, but currently the negatives outweigh the positives and most people are not using AI responsibly at all. I have little to no respect for people who use AI to make memes or who use it for stupid everyday shit that they could have figured out themselves.
The most dystopian shit I have seen recently was when my boyfriend and I went to watch Weapons in cinema and we got an ad for an AI assistent. The ad is basically this braindead bimbo at a laundry mat deciding to use AI to tell her how to wash her clothes instead of looking at the fucking flips on her clothes and putting two and two together. She literally takes a picture of the flip and has the AI assistent tell her how to do it and then going “thank you so much, I could have never done this without you”.
I fucking laughed in the cinema. Laughed and turned to my boyfriend and said: this is so fucking dystopian, dude.
I feel insane for seeing so many people just mindlessly walking down this path of utter retardation. Even when you tell them how disastrous it is for the planet, it doesn’t compute in their heads because it is not only convenient to have a machine think for you. It’s also addictive.
You are not correct about the energy use of prompts. They are not very energy intensive at all. Training the AI, however, is breaking the power grid.
I’m pretty sure it’s a product of scale, but also, GPT5 is markedly worse. I heard estimates of 40 watt hours for a single medium length response. Napkin math says my motorcycle can travel about kilometer per single medium length response of GPT5. Now multiply that by how many people are using AI (anyone going online these days), now multiply that by how many times a day each user causes a prompt. Now multiply that by 365 and we have how much power they’re using in a year.
Maybe not an individual prompt, but with how many prompts are made for stupid stuff every day, it will stack up to quite a lot of CO2 in the long run.
Not denying the training of AI is demanding way more energy, but that doesn’t really matter as both the action of manufacturing, training and millions of people using AI amounts to the same bleak picture long term.
Considering how the discussion about environmental protection has only just started to be taken seriously and here they come and dump this newest bomb on humanity, it is absolutely devastating that AI has been allowed to run rampant everywhere.
According to this article, 500.000 AI prompts amounts to the same CO2 outlet as a
I don’t know how many times a day 500.000 AI prompts are reached, but I’m sure it is more than twice or even thrice. As time moves on it will be much more than that. It will probably outdo the number of actual flights between London and New York in a day. Every day. It will probably also catch up to whatever energy cost it took to train the AI in the first place and surpass it.
Because you know. People need their memes and fake movies and AI therapist chats and meal suggestions and history lessons and a couple of iterations on that book report they can’t be fucked to write. One person can easily end up prompting hundreds of times in a day without even thinking about it. And if everybody starts using AI to think for them at work and at home, it’ll end up being many, many, many flights back and forth between London and New York every day.
I have a hard time believing that article’s guesstimate since Google (who actually runs these data centers and doesn’t have to guess) just published a report stating that the median prompt uses about a quarter of a watt-hour, or the equivalent of running a microwave oven for one second. You’re absolutely right that flights use an unconscionable amount of energy. Perhaps your advocacy time would be much better spent fighting against that.
And Google would never lie about how much energy a prompt costs, right?
Especially not since they have an invested interest in having people use their AI products, right?
… They’re kind of governed by law about what things they’re allowed to tell their stockholders.
And before you try to say otherwise, yes, laws that protect the ownership class are still being enforced.
That’s not really Google’s style when it comes to data center whitepapers. They did, however, omit all information about training energy use.
Ahahah. Not their style to lie and betray people for profit? Get out!
Sam Altman, or whatever fuck his name is, asked users to stop saying please and thank you to chatgpt because it was costing the company millions. Please and thank you are the less power hungry questions chatgpt gets. And its costing chatgpt millions. Probably 10s of millions of dollars if the CEO made a public comment about it.
You’re right training is hella power hungry, but even using gen ai has heavy power costs