So I’m a little confused, genuinely- this is in good faith. The link you provided was saying “the chat bot” features you shouldn’t worry about. It in itself has a disclaimer that image/video/generation is NOT covered here.
Image
To be sure, the wimpy little chat bot that hallucinates that people should add glue to their pizza to stop the cheese sliding off or that people should eat rocks-part of it isn’t burning the BIG watt-hours. There’s more to AI than unhinged crappy chat sessions.
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 1 week ago
This is correct, but not all Data Center Usage is GenAI too. I agree that video generation is pretty energy intensive and not something that should be done on the regular, but image generation runs here on my graphics card pretty fast, so it's not a big deal and comparable to chatbot responses.
Watching an hour of Netflix uses about 0,8kWh, which is a lot more but noone tries to make people have a bad conscience for binge watching a series. That's Datacenter usage too, and a lot more than GenAI.
AI is also used a lot in Science, and even if i know that scientists aren't that popular in the US, we probably agree that this activity is summa summarum positive for humanity, so lets keep it.
So where is the AI usage you propose is worse than global air travel? Lets look at total numbers here:
Electricity usage is 30% of the total CO2 emitted in the USA. Data centers in total used 4.4% in 2023, estimates say this will reach between 6.7 and 12% in 2028. If we take the worst case, Data Centers will be responsible for a bit more than 3% of all CO2 emissions in the USA, best case about 1.7%.
That's not nothing, but it's still a lot less then global flight, which was responsible for 9% of CO2 emissions in the US transport sector, which amounts to about 4% of Total US emissions 2022. Please note we are talking US flight emissions here, NOT GLOBAL. Since most datacenters worldwide reside in the US by far, your statement is bullshit.