Beautiful. I propose to start questioning very silly reasoning prompts. This way we get more CO2 and better food production/growth.
Some of your AI prompts could cause 50 times more CO2 emissions than others
Submitted 22 hours ago by Pro@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
https://frontiersin.org/news/2025/06/19/ai-prompts-50-times-more-co2-emissions
Comments
chebur54@lemmy.world 57 minutes ago
McDropout@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Lemmy wants me to believe that AI is the danger for climate change. This is like drinking through paper straw while the pollution comes from mega-factories who dump their waste in the river.
So AI is the problem… huh… and not the thousands of missiles dropped in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and the Occupied Terrorist Zionazi Land.
Cool I guess, AI Bad!
Witziger_Waschbaer@feddit.org 2 hours ago
Shockingly, several things can be bad at the same time. What do you think will happen to places that already tend to struggle with heat (like quite a few places in the middle east), if they get even warmer? What will happen to the people that live there? Will they be able to move to colder places? Or will they simply run into borders? Borders, which are protected by more and more money and weapons (and drones controlled by AI, funny, huh?)?
3abas@lemm.ee 1 hour ago
You can run a model locally on your phone and it will answer most prompts without breaking a sweet, it’s actually way less energy than googling and loading the content from a website that’s hosted 24/7 just waiting for you to access the content.
Training a model is expensive, using it isn’t.
McDropout@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Humans love to live in places that aren’t suitable for their life.
People in some parts of Europe, Russia, North America live in places where without heating, they would simply cease to exist. Same for places in the middle east, people in Qatar and UAE live in places where without AC, they would cease to exist.
Both ways of living is harmful for environment. Maybe we should reevaluate where we live.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
Meh, whataboutism.
Zenith@lemm.ee 3 hours ago
I think most people have decided they like using AI more than they care about climate change
dohpaz42@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Yes, blame the consumers yet again when we all know corporations are the biggest climate offenders.
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
And won’t stop putting this slop in everything.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
Not really, this is more like an obvious statement like "certain activities like sports may cause you to burn twice the calories. Yeah, doh.
9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
Sometimes i use ai to analyze spreadsheet data for me and spit out an excel sheet with the answers. It says “thinking” for like 10 mins, and i can just imagine some GPUs on fire in a datacenter somewhere…
middlemanSI@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
When you do 0 AI prompts, they all cause the same amount of emissions, which is 0.
BB84@mander.xyz 3 hours ago
Also true: When you do 0 AI prompts, they all cause the same amount of emissions, which is 999999999 gigajoules.
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 22 hours ago
Is it just me or is that stupid way to measure consuming computing power? The CPUs themselves doing computations do not produce any pollutants (unless you calculate how much of that is created during manufacturing ang logistics, which I doubt). It’s the (without question stupidly large) energy consumption which might, but big players are at least greenwashing their actions by using renewable energy more and more.
Why not create comparison like “generating 1000 words of your fanfiction consumes as much energy as you do all day” or something more easily to compare.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Why not create comparison like “generating 1000 words of your fanfiction consumes as much energy as you do all day” or something more easily to compare.
Because its still bullshit. The bulk of the utilization of these LLMs isn’t going to your 1000 word Princess Leia/Dianna Troy lesbian romance. They’re going to some call center in the Philippines blowing up your cell with automated voice-to-text phone calls and a bargain basement Netflix animation studio experimenting with AI generated anime.
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 19 hours ago
Because its still bullshit.
Obviously. But I have no context on how much my actions create co2 in the first place. I assume driving a car generates a majority of it, or maybe heating the house, but I still don’t have any clue how many kilograms that might be. But what I do know is how many kilowatts my house consumes electricity and at least roughly how much our appliances use, so if you want to try and blame me for consuming precious resources by generating text or watching a video at least give me an measurement I can easily comprehend.
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Recycling 2: Electric Bugaloo
Sandbar_Trekker@lemmy.today 18 hours ago
Why not create comparison like “generating 1000 words of your fanfiction consumes as much energy as you do all day” or something more easily to compare.
Considering that you can generate 1000 words in a single prompt to ChatGPT, the energy to do that would be about 0.3Wh.
That’s about as much energy as a typical desktop would use in about 8 seconds while browsing the fediverse (assuming a desktop consuming energy at a rate of ~150W).
Or, on the other end of the spectrum, if you’re browsing the fediverse on Voyager with a smartphone consuming energy at a rate of 2W, then that would be about 9 minutes of browsing the fediverse (4.5 minutes if using a regular browser app in my case since it bumped up the energy usage to ~4W).
pennomi@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Because it really doesn’t. For most tasks, it would require more human energy to do the work than an LLM, just because we are much slower at it than an AI. I mean, humans operate at around 80 W just by existing (basal metabolic rate).
If the AI is powered by renewables, it’s cleaner than humans. If it’s powered by fossil fuels, it’s likely much worse (though I haven’t run the calculations).
Now obviously, this presumes that the output of an AI is even valuable at all, which is often not the case.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
I’m somewhat in agreement I think. Is it really me talking to ChatGPT about the Holographic Theory in quantum mechanics, and why the Mac version of Brother’s P-Touch software is such trash, that are destroying the environment? Or is it the soulless corporate CEOs laying off thousands of customer service reps in order to replace them with AI bots, that are really consuming all the energy? Not to mention all the lives they have directly and more immediately destroyed with their decisions.
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
just to set the record straight:
“For example, having DeepSeek R1 (70 billion parameters) answer 600,000 questions would create CO2 emissions equal to a round-trip flight from London to New York. Meanwhile, Qwen 2.5 (72 billion parameters) can answer more than three times as many questions (about 1.9 million) with similar accuracy rates while generating the same emissions.”
i’d say that makes the average usage for personal reasons an non-issue.
Coreidan@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
That’s cool. Not my problem to solve.
FireWire400@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Does this also apply to AI models I run locally on my computer?
Valmond@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
No they are magically free.
/s
01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 9 hours ago
That’s a good question no one else seems to be asking. When you run local prompts, you’re using more battery on your laptop or power from your PSU, but both of those are limited by their relatively small power consumption (when compared to server farms). Therefore, it could be likened to encoding heavy video or exporting complex blender models. Are you using more electricity? Yes. Is it city-eroding amounts more? Not even close.
webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 21 hours ago
What a stat.
Sometimes i go 50 times further then other times.
It kinda depends on where i am going.
captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.org 21 hours ago
Yes but those stupid prompts also cost Spam Altman money… which makes my cold iron heart glow.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Nothing costs Altman a dime. He’s been playing with House Money since day one.
What is crazy is that Microsoft kept cutting this con artist billion dollar check after billion dollar check, only for him to squander it on The Machine That Makes Creepy Studio Ghibli Knock-Offs.
seaQueue@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Always remember to say please and thank you
Netrunner@programming.dev 30 minutes ago
Wow tokens exist.