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 alphalpha 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.
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I miss the days where climate activists didn’t get distracted by small change like GenAI. The big ticket issues haven’t changed since the beginning of the climate movement: Cars, Flights, Industry (mainly concrete), Meat and Heating/AC are what drives climate change - any movement that polices individual usage of negligible CO2 emission will fail because noone likes to be preached at.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 5 hours ago
I mean the difference between pointing out the environmental impacts of AI compared to the environmental impacts of heating/air conditioning, industry, transportation etc. is there’s useful output from one and the other just creates low quality slop.
Most of the use of AI right now is entirely pointless. It exists purely because of the AI bubble and eventually companies won’t be burning queries on annoying sales chat bots that the user isn’t even interacting with or inaccurate search result summaries that you can’t reasonably turn off
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
a) many people swear by it - is it so useless then? it’s a personal question, and the answer is not the same for everyone. ChatGPT is one of the most downloaded apps worldwide, so to assume that all of those people do not gain something from it cannot be right. b) people do a lot of useless things that all have a climate cost, but noone bats an eye when someone says they watched 2 hours of 4k video, which uses a lot more ressources than Chatbots. c) chatbots that noone interacts with do not consume resources in a meaningful way, since you have to make a request for that - the greeting will be hardcoded in 99% of cases. d) i agree that the amount of VC money inflates AI usage, but VC money does this with everything: dotcom bubble, 2008 crash (housing bubble), crypto bubble, nft bubble… the difference here is that people actually have personal use scenarios, regardless of VC money. e) I agree that opt-in should be the default, i’m no fan of google’s bot, but i actually just don’t use google, i use mullvad leta for most things, and i’m waiting for the rollout of the european search index that qwant and ecosia created - it went live in france recently and i’m excited to try it out when it starts here!
jj4211@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
For climate sure, though local impact by focusing so much demand in such small geography does create outsized impacts for that local area in terms of local energy and water.