Comment by Insanity 13 hours ago
People in the comments seem confused about this with statements like “greenest AI is no AI” style comments. And well, obviously that’s true but it’s an apples to pears comparison.
Clearly Ecosia is pushing for “people want AI” _and_ we want to make it more ecofriendly. Taking away features from users altogether is not the right answer.
It’s like saying “cheapest car is no car”. It doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of “wanting a car”.
> AI isn’t especially environmentally unfriendly
I think the actual answer is more nuanced and less positive. Although I appreciste how many citations your comment has!
I'd point to just oe, which is a really good article MIT's technology review published about exactly this issue[0].
I'd make two overall points firstly to:
> when you have the opportunity to use human labour or AI, AI is almost certainly the greener option as well.
I think that this is never the trade off, AI normally generates marketing copy for someone in marketing, not by itself, and even when if it does everything itself, the marketing person might stop being employed but certainly doesn't stop existing and producing co2.
My point is, AI electricity usage is almost exclusively new usage, not replacing something else.
And secondly on Simon Wilison / Sam Altman's argument that:
> Assuming that higher end, a ChatGPT prompt by Sam Altman's estimate uses: > > 0.34 Wh / (240 Wh / 3600 seconds) = 5.1 seconds of Netflix > > Or double that, 10.2 seconds, if you take the lower end of the Netflix estimate instead.
This may well be true for prompts, but misses out the energy intensive training process. Which we can't do if we actually want to know the full emmisions impact. Especially in an environment when new models are being trained all the time.
On a more positive note, I think Ecosia's article makes a good point that AI requires electricity, not pollution. It's a really bad piece of timing that AI has taken off initially in the US at a time when the political climate is trying to steer energy away from safer more sustainable sources, and towards more dangerous, polluting ones. But that isn't an environment thay has to continue, and Chinese AI work in the last year has also done a good job of demonstrating that AI trainibg energy use can be a lot kess than previously assumed.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...
I think this article is a good response to the MIT article: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/reactions-to-mit-technolog...
> AI normally generates marketing copy for someone in marketing, not by itself, and even when if it does everything itself, the marketing person might stop being employed but certainly doesn't stop existing and producing co2.
Sure, but it does it a lot quicker than they can, which means they spend more of their time on other things. You’re getting more work done on average for the carbon you are “spending”.
Also, even when ignoring the carbon cost of the human, just the difference in energy use from their computer equipment in terms of time spent on the task outstrips AI energy use.
> This may well be true for prompts, but misses out the energy intensive training process.
If you are trying to account for the fully embodied cost including production, then I think things tilt even more in favour of AI being environmentally-friendly. Do you think producing a Netflix show is carbon-neutral? I have no idea what the carbon cost of producing, e.g. Stranger Things is, but I’m guessing it vastly outweighs the training costs of an LLM.
Glad to see someone refute the AI water argument, I'm sick of that one. But I do not see how the displacement argument fits. Maybe you can elaborate but I don't see how we can compare AI usage to watching Netflix for any length of time. I can't see a situation where someone would substitute watching stranger things for asking chatGPT questions?
The writing and illustrating activities use less energy, but the people out there using AI to generate ten novels and covers and fire them into the kindle store would not have written ten novels, so this is not displacement either
How many tens of thousands more pages of text and image are churned out per human created page though?
Pages that would never be created were the stochastic parrot to be turned off and never squawk.
It'd save a lot of energy, water, carbon emissions to just let the already existing humans just get on with the churn.
> How many tens of thousands more pages of text and image are churned out per human created page though?
I don’t know, how many?
> It'd save a lot of energy, water, carbon emissions to just let the already existing humans just get on with the churn.
How much, and how do you know that?
> And when you have the opportunity to use human labour or AI, AI is almost certainly the greener option as well. For instance, the carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are far lower for AI than for humans:
Do you plan on killing that person to stop their emissions?
If you don't use the AI program the emissions don't happen, if you don't hire a person for a job, they still use the carbon resources.
So the comparison isn't 1000kg Co2 for a human vs 1kg Co2 for an LLM. It's 1000kg Co2 for a human vs 1001kg Co2 for an LLM.
I did, you clearly didn't.
> For instance, the emission footprint of a US resident is approximately 15 metric tons CO2e per year22, which translates to roughly 1.7 kg CO2e per hour
Those 15,000kg of CO2e are emitted regardless of that that person does.
The article also makes assumptions about laptops that are false.
>Assuming an average power consumption of 75 W for a typical laptop computer.
Laptops draw closer to 10W than 75W, (peak power is closer to 75W but almost not laptops can dissipate 75W continually).
The article is clearly written by someone with an axe to grind, not someone who is interested in understanding the cost of LLM's/AI/etc.
It says that ignoring the human carbon use, just their computer use during the task far outweighs the AI energy use. So your response “are you planning on killing the human?” makes zero sense in that context. “They are wrong about the energy use of a laptop” makes more sense , but you didn’t say that until I pushed you to actually read it.
75W is not outlandish when you consider the artist will almost certainly have a large monitor plugged in, external accessories, some will be using a desktop, etc. And even taking the smaller figure, AI use is still smaller.
The human carbon use is still relevant. If they were not doing the writing, they could accomplish some other valuable tasks. Because they are spending it on things the AI can do, somebody else will have to do those things or they won’t get done at all.
There are fundamental reasons public transit is always more efficient than private cars. There's no fundamental reason a really good search engine is more efficient than an LLM or any other kind of AI.
Search engines aren't just some database lookups, is the thing. There's actually quite a bit of linear alegbra involved in both, for page ranking especially
Anyways these sorts of comparisons make no sense to begin with, and quite obviously at the moment the worst actors cough xAI cough who are deploying massively polluting generators into residential neighborhoods are much worse than, say, Google Search
This has to be satire. LLMs are a monumental jump on search engines.
Imagine a hypothetical search competition and you are given Google and I am given ChatGPT. I’ll win every single time.
I disagree. Without AI I might take 15 min to search for something in google that would have taken me a single prompt in ChatGPT. The energy used by my screen in those 15 minutes would be higher than the energy taken by that prompt.
Yeah, but people here also know that AI that doesn’t use vast amounts of energy is generally returning mediocre results. And mediocre results are not useful at all. So whatever you save on energy doesn’t really matter if the utility is going to zero.
Your comparison to cars is good. A cheap car will be slower and less comfortable but will get you where you want to be ultimately. That’s the core value of the car. A bad LLM may not get you anywhere. It’s more like having a cheap powerdrill that can drill through plaster but not through concrete, in the end you still want the expensive drill…
> People in the comments seem confused about this with statements like “greenest AI is no AI” style comments. And well, obviously that’s true
It’s not true. AI isn’t especially environmentally unfriendly, which means that if you’re using AI then whatever activity you would otherwise be doing stands a good chance of being more environmentally unfriendly. For instance, a ChatGPT prompt uses about as much energy as watching 5–10 seconds of Netflix. So AI is greener than no AI in the cases where it displaces other, less green activities.
And when you have the opportunity to use human labour or AI, AI is almost certainly the greener option as well. For instance, the carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are far lower for AI than for humans:
> Our findings reveal that AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO2e per page of text generated compared to human writers, while AI illustration systems emit between 310 and 2900 times less CO2e per image than their human counterparts.
— https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x
The AI water issue is fake: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...
A ChatGPT prompt uses about as much energy as watching 5–10 seconds of Netflix: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/29/chatgpt-netflix/