I would be curious to compare that to Google search. Some experts estimate Google search and the time spent reviewing the results on your device can be 3-10g of Co2. The Google part alone is maybe .2g per search.
www.fastcompany.com/…/internet_impact_visualized
Here they estimated in 2018 that just rendering front page cost 300 tons a minute, so 432,000 tons a day. Just for the front page.
Just to put it in perspective that the Internet itself is not free. It’s expensive to power sending all this data around!
Honytawk@feddit.nl 3 days ago
Yes, when you go by billions, the numbers quickly add up.
For beef, you can feed 1 meal to 3 people, which creates 60 KG of CO~2~.
If you calculate this for Europe, we’d get about 14900000 tonnes of CO~2~ PER DAY.
So promting, even from the biggest LLM currently on the planet, is still only 1/2000 of eating beef in Europe alone.
Your point is misleading even more.
Denjin@feddit.uk 3 days ago
So ChatGPT isn’t as polluting as the beef industry, what’s your point? We can go on asking for LLMs to make pictures of big tiddy anime girls and the answers to simple questions that it still gets wrong because people eat meat still?
Just like bitcoin and all the other pump and dump cryptos, LLM chatbots created a market that didn’t exist before that needlessly adds excess pollution (and to be clear, I agree with OPs primary point that the environmental impact isn’t the worst thing about them), and they’re trying to force them into every aspect of our lives whether they’re suited to it or not.
Highlighting the environmental (and commercial, social and privacy) concerns is one tool to get policy makers to maybe think twice about signing another huge deal to get ChatGPT embedded in yet another part of our lives.
Honytawk@feddit.nl 3 days ago
My point?
If you complain the world is burning because of AI but you eat beef, you are contributing >2000 times as much as a non-beef eater who uses AI.
Neither AI not beef are a necessity.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
It’s highlighting hypocrisy. It’s asking: do you take this problem seriously, or are you just complaining?
Having LLMs shoved into everything is a serious problem. But it’s a problem the way that forced updates and invasion of privacy were already a problem. Fixating on energy use is pretense. It’s working backwards to point at the negative externalities of something you’ve already made conclusions about, as if those factors were relevant to your conclusion. Using that as rhetoric is the nature of bad faith.
AnonomousWolf@lemmy.world 3 days ago
This is exactly my point