Submitted 14 hours ago by slazer2au@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
In the late 2000s there was a push by a lot of businesses to not print emails and people use to add a ‘Please consider this environment before printing this email.’
Image
Considering how bad LLMs/‘ai’ are with power consumption and water usage a new useless tag email footer should be made.
To be fair they never cared about environment. A paper is something easy to recycle and certainly not the most polluting material to produce.
It was more about saving money, greenwashing and pushing a conversion towards digital archiving (which is much more efficient that paper)
Please consider the environment before sending me an email, seriously, I won’t read it.
Ooooh, I’m totally adding that to my email signature.
If you don't mind the additional real estate, it would also be great to have a version where the "printing this e-mail" part is still there but struck out, for people who aren't aware of the original.
o7
Is that good? I’m old and have no idea what that means.😆
I want to see the “cease and desist you may not use my facebook posts without my express permission” type footers but against AI to start showing up
I don’t think regular people really understand the power needed for AI. It’s often taught that we just have it. But not where it comes from.
I don’t think regular people really understand how little 3W per request is. It’s the energy you take up by eating 3kcal. Or what your WiFi router uses in half an hour. Or your clothes dryer in 5 seconds.
True, but most people don’t realise how little not printing an email ‘helped’ the environment.
It would have been significant if a lot of people did it.
you need to generate about 2 million emails for the carbon emission of one transatlantic flight, personal use is definitely not the power hungry shit you imagine
I am a small part of the problem, so I am not a problem.
i don’t know what amount of energy and water LLM’s or image generation use, but you vastly overestimate it if you react like this.
If you don’t have your screen on power save after 15 seconds of non-use, rethink it - 8 minutes of screen time assuming a 30W monitor equals about 1 ChatGPT request, and that’s including the training of the model and the production of the hardware it’s running on.
If it cost any real amount of money, don’t you think that people would have to pay for that? ChatGPT has 400m users, and only 11m actually pay for it.
I think they’re pointing out the 180-turn in so-called “priorities.” Companies once claimed to want something done for the “sake of the environment,” but now they have no problem using resource-intensive AI without any acknowledgement of how bad it is for the environment.
Both things (avoiding LLM written mail and the paper printouts) are meaningless greenwashing gestures in comparison to - for example - the additional car use due to “return to office”-bullshit.
“If everyone is littering, it’s not a big deal if I throw the occasional can on the ground”
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.
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.
This is the main reason I am reticent about using ai. I can get around its funtional limitations but I need to know they have brought the energy usage down.
How much further down than 3W/request can you go? i hope you don’t let your microwave run 10 seconds longer than optimal, because that’s exactly the amount of energy we are talking about. Or running a 5W nightlight for a bit over half an hour.
LLM and Image generation are not what kills the climate. What does are flights, cars, meat, and bad insulation of houses leading to high energy usage in winter. Even if we turned off all GenAI, it wouldn’t even leave a dent compared to those behemoths.
It’s not that bad when it’s just you fucking around having it write fanfics instead of doing something more taxing, like playing an AAA video game or, idk, run a microwave or whatever it is normies do. Training a model is very taxing, but running them isn’t and the opportunity cost might even be net positive if you tend to use your gpu a lot.
It becomes more of a problem when everyone is doing it when it’s not needed, like reading and writing emails. There’s no net positive, it’s a very large scale usage, and brains are a hell of a lot more efficient at it. This use case has gotta be one of the dumbest imaginable, all while making people legitimately dumber using it over time.
oh you are talking locally I think. I play games on my steamdeck as my laptop could not handle it at all.
It’s the same as playing a 3d game. It’s a GPU or GPU equivalent doing the work. It doesn’t matter if you are asking it to summarize an email or play Red Dead Redemption.
I mean if every web search I do is like playing a 3d game then I will stick with web searches. 3d gaming is the most energy intensive thing I do on a computer.
You can run one on your PC locally so you know how much power it is consuming
I already stress my laptop with what I do so I doubt I will do that anytime soon. I tend to use pretty old hardware though. 5 year plus. honestly closer to 10.
But it’s everywhere now and it’s almost impossible to use mainstream services without it being used. I can just go to Google anymore, type a search query and get a reply without AI bs being used. How long before it’s baked into the GMail compose window and it doesn’t without me wanting to.
Then we stop using it.
I think we need a Rule 34 of open-source programs:
Rule 34: If it exists, there is an open-source version of it
i) If no open-source version exists, it is currently being created
ii) If no open-source version is being created, you must create it yourself
Doesn’t gmail already do this? I seem to remember there being ‘suggested response’ options before I turned it off in the settings that were definitely AI generated.
Thanks. You reminded me to turn it off. Did that once and it came back on.
Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 hour ago
🏞 Please consider the environment before issuing a return-to-office mandate
a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
This is the right response - RTO is much worse for the climate than GenAI.