Comment by hexage1814 18 hours ago
To me the "ChatGPT is destroying the environment "card always felt somewhat like bad faith arguing from the anti-AI crowd trying to find any excuse for being against AI. Like, the same people who complained about "using AI is destroying environment" seemed to have no issue with boarding a plane which would emit a bunch of CO2 so that they can have a vacation in Europe or the like. Selective environmentalism.
I mean, it's a literal net new expenditure of power and water. I also deeply doubt they have "no issue" with plane travel. You're just assuming the worst and most hypocritical position to someone, which seems deeply bad faith as well.
It's literally true that most of the AI vendors and their data center partners are writing off energy and water conservation targets they'd had for the near future because of LLM money. That is actually bad in the short and likely long term, especially as people use LLMs for increasingly frivolous things. Is it really necessary to have an LLM essentially do a "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google Search for you at some multiple of that environmental cost? Because that's what most of my friends and coworkers use ChatGPT for. Very rarely are they using it to get anything more complex than just searching wikipedia or documentation you could have had bookmarked.
A person has a choice of if they take a flight and if it's worth it for them. They have no power except for raising a complaint in public on if OpenAI or Google or whoever spends vast amounts of money and power to train some new model. If your bar is that no one is allowed to complain about a company burning energy unless they live a totally blameless life farming their own food without electricity then random companies will get to do any destructive act they want.
It's less bad faith, more a meme that has become so prevalent that it's impossible to dispell as it's something too nuanced for social media. I've seen more than a few social media posts asking "do they really cut down a rainforest every time someone generates an AI image?"
I mean we can go back and forth all day with credulous clowns on both sides. There are certainly plenty of misguided AI advocates who think what they're using is magic.
You are talking about hypocrites.
What about the people who take the protection of the environment seriously?
They got now a setback because not only didn’t we reach our previous goals on lowering energy consumption but know we put new consumption on top of that. Just because the existing one ate worse doesn’t make it good.
There is a reason why MS missed its CO2 targets and why everyone is kn search for more energy sources.
They all create more CO2.
Who is this person you’re constructing? Being concerned about plane emissions and travel is an incredibly common thing and people are adjusting their lifestyles accordingly - lots of overnight sleeper train lines are reopening due to demand.