Comment by pretendgeneer

Comment by pretendgeneer 8 hours ago

> 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.

JimDabell 8 hours ago

Please read the source I linked to; your reply doesn’t make any sense in that context.

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pretendgeneer 7 hours ago

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.

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- JimDabell 7 hours ago
  
  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.
  
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