The combined worldwide energy usage of ChatGPT is equivalent to about 20k American households.
Or about 10 small countries.
Not even being that hyperbolic: American households are fabulously, insanely wasteful of energy.
The rest of the world (barring places like Saudi Arabia, which are rarely used as moral or socio-cultural examples the world should learn from) has done the whole ‘What’s the point in trying to better the world when America and China do more damage than the rest of the world combined?’ debate decades ago, and we ended up deciding that we can’t control the worst offenders, and can only do what we can.
Literally any moral value or standard is subject to ‘but but but what’s the point if you can’t eradicate the problem entirely?’, that’s why it’s such a weak fallacy.
Minimising absolutely pointless destruction of non-renewable resources won’t successfully save the environment tomorrow, but we can do it anyway, and if will help.
We can’t eradicate theft, but we can do our best to pay for things before taking them. We know that being polite in public isn’t the 1 thing holding our society back from utopian perfection, but we do it anyway, because it helps.
We can all pinky promise not to murder or violently assault anyone, and pay no attention to the weirdo protesting that ‘What’s the point in not assaulting people when actually, cars and illness and unhealthy lifestyles do more harm’, because that person is presumably just looking for an excuse to hit someone.
And yeah, long story short: using ‘American households’ as an example of how insignificant AI’s energy usage is is kinda like saying smoking is safe because it’s actually less harmful than spending 6 hours a day on a busy road in Delhi.
If you don’t spend 6 hours a day near busy roads in Delhi, you won’t exactly think ‘oh that’s ok then’.
And if you do, your lungs need all the help they can get and you’ve got all the more reason to be wary of smoking (I say this as a smoker btw).
Huge areas of Africa and the middle east are becoming uninhabited because of climate change. Those people all need food and water, and the western world does not have the resources or inclination to house and feed them all. It is almost unanimously described as the worst crisis humanity has ever faced, and the practical solution - stop wasting fossil fuels and non-renewable resources when there’s a viable alternative - is so insanely easy.
Billions of lives could be saved, if everyone on the planet agreed to be mindful of energy waste.
Not ‘stop using energy’ or ‘everybody become vegan and live in houses made of recycled banana peel’, just quit wasting.
But there are entire countries who don’t seem to get the whole ‘acting together for the betterment of humanity’ thing, so that incredibly simple solution won’t work.
And all we can do in the meantime is to lead by example, make ‘responsible consumption’ a lifestyle rather than an option, and hope against hope that enough Americans and Chinese people decide to reduce their dependence on 1000 daily images of shrimp Jesus or an endless output of bullshit papers written by AI to pretend that’s what science means, in time to maybe save some of the planet before wildfire season lasts 12 months a year.
Also: it’s not even like you’re gaining anything from constantly using AI or LLMs. Just fleeting dopamine hits while your brain cells wither. Of all the habits one could try to reduce, or be mindful of, to literally save lives and countries, anybody who honestly thinks generative AI is more important is very addicted.
But there are entire countries who don’t seem to get the whole ‘acting together for the betterment of humanity’ thing,
I would describe it as ‘indoctrinated by Big Oil’, heh… It is awful.
Also: it’s not even like you’re gaining anything from constantly using AI or LLMs. Just fleeting dopamine hits while your brain cells wither. Of all the habits one could try to reduce, or be mindful of, to literally save lives and countries, anybody who honestly thinks generative AI is more important is very addicted. Also also: it’s just so shit.
The majority of text ingestion/token generation is consumed by other machines for stuff like coding assistants or corporate data processing, and this includes image ingestion. I dunno what fraction is image/video generation is, but I suspect it’s not high, as there’s really no point outside of cheap spam.
You are not wrong, and corpo AI is shit for plenty of reasons (including being needlessly power hungry when it doesn’t have to be), but I’m not relenting that this is a ‘small fish’ issue to pursue in reference to the massive waste in so many other parts of the US.
Big Oil and such delight in such distractions because it draws attention away from their more profitable and harmful sectors they’d rather people forget about.
I totally agree that each query/ picture isn’t literally burning huge amounts of energy - I wonder if we’re kind of making the same argument but I misread your first comment - but it’s also true that each cigarette doesn’t actually do that much damage to your lungs and buying a single puppy from a puppy mill isn’t funding the entire industry, just like buying a tiny ivory figurine isn’t killing any animals and buying a single share in EvilCorp isn’t funding the CEO’s baby-killing missions.
But, in a way, it kind of is.
If you need that cigarette, I won’t stop you. If the ivory is antique or really special to you or whatever, we’ve all got vices, maybe also donate to an animal charity. If you really think EvilCorp isn’t that bad and the CEO only killed a few babies that one time, or if you don’t really mix your ethics with your finances or whatever, cool, everyone makes their own moral boundaries.
(I can’t think of a decent reason to buy from puppy mills, but I’m sure they exist).
But I think we all have a responsibility to make these ethical decisions. If you are adding to the AI user base, feeding it your data and training it and pumping its figures, there are a variety of legit reasons to do so, from curiosity to convenience to FOMO.
And if you don’t care about the environment or wider impact of your actions, alright, rock on. We can’t all care about everything all the time.
But in my (unsolicited) opinion, when you use it with no decent reason or benefit, you are prioritising your fleeting whims over the deadliest threat to the world. It’s like owning an oversized gas guzzling car (personal choice) and leaving it to idle for hours at a time because it saves 15 seconds in the morning. Weird example, but to my mind it’s the same.
I’m not going to shit on people’s hobbies, but I used to throw my cigarette ends down drains because I thought it was tidier, until I found out that nope, really not good for the drains or water system. So I bought a little portable ashtray.
I have no particular passion for drains and don’t smoke that much when I’m not near a bin or ashtray, but it wasn’t a huge sacrifice to buy an ashtray. The cumulative damage to the ecosystem seemed to outweigh the personal convenience of dropping my cigarette end there, so I couldn’t really justify contributing to a bad thing that wouldn’t affect me if I didn’t need to.
But - I still see lots of cigarette ends on the floor. Maybe they haven’t heard about the damage it causes, maybe they have different moral priorities, maybe they were in a real hurry; everybody makes their own decision.
I just wish more people would make that decision, rather than using it because it’s there and everyone else is.
But I think we all have a responsibility to make these ethical decisions. If you are adding to the AI user base, feeding it your data and training it and pumping its figures, there are a variety of legit reasons to do so, from curiosity to convenience to FOMO. And if you don’t care about the environment or wider impact of your actions, alright, rock on. We can’t all care about everything all the time.
AI doesn’t have to be a corporate nightmare. It can be self-hosted, or hosted by a third party that doesn’t log or train on anything (which is extremely common).
And if you’re concerned with the relatively marginal energy use of inference; use Cerebras or Groq (not Grok) or Huawei, to get away from Nvidia and the crazy clocks they run chips at. Or even just something like GLM or Deepseek that’s deployed with quite reasonable efficiency, on peanuts for hardware.
The fundamental issue is corporate enshittification, basically. And that the vast majority of folks, unfortunately, do take the shitty Big Tech options because they’re the loudest, and no-one knows there are better, cheaper, and nicer options.
Or about 10 small countries. Not even being that hyperbolic: American households are fabulously, insanely wasteful of energy.
The rest of the world (barring places like Saudi Arabia, which are rarely used as moral or socio-cultural examples the world should learn from) has done the whole ‘What’s the point in trying to better the world when America and China do more damage than the rest of the world combined?’ debate decades ago, and we ended up deciding that we can’t control the worst offenders, and can only do what we can.
Literally any moral value or standard is subject to ‘but but but what’s the point if you can’t eradicate the problem entirely?’, that’s why it’s such a weak fallacy. Minimising absolutely pointless destruction of non-renewable resources won’t successfully save the environment tomorrow, but we can do it anyway, and if will help. We can’t eradicate theft, but we can do our best to pay for things before taking them. We know that being polite in public isn’t the 1 thing holding our society back from utopian perfection, but we do it anyway, because it helps.
We can all pinky promise not to murder or violently assault anyone, and pay no attention to the weirdo protesting that ‘What’s the point in not assaulting people when actually, cars and illness and unhealthy lifestyles do more harm’, because that person is presumably just looking for an excuse to hit someone.
And yeah, long story short: using ‘American households’ as an example of how insignificant AI’s energy usage is is kinda like saying smoking is safe because it’s actually less harmful than spending 6 hours a day on a busy road in Delhi. If you don’t spend 6 hours a day near busy roads in Delhi, you won’t exactly think ‘oh that’s ok then’. And if you do, your lungs need all the help they can get and you’ve got all the more reason to be wary of smoking (I say this as a smoker btw).
Huge areas of Africa and the middle east are becoming uninhabited because of climate change. Those people all need food and water, and the western world does not have the resources or inclination to house and feed them all. It is almost unanimously described as the worst crisis humanity has ever faced, and the practical solution - stop wasting fossil fuels and non-renewable resources when there’s a viable alternative - is so insanely easy.
Billions of lives could be saved, if everyone on the planet agreed to be mindful of energy waste. Not ‘stop using energy’ or ‘everybody become vegan and live in houses made of recycled banana peel’, just quit wasting.
But there are entire countries who don’t seem to get the whole ‘acting together for the betterment of humanity’ thing, so that incredibly simple solution won’t work. And all we can do in the meantime is to lead by example, make ‘responsible consumption’ a lifestyle rather than an option, and hope against hope that enough Americans and Chinese people decide to reduce their dependence on 1000 daily images of shrimp Jesus or an endless output of bullshit papers written by AI to pretend that’s what science means, in time to maybe save some of the planet before wildfire season lasts 12 months a year.
Also: it’s not even like you’re gaining anything from constantly using AI or LLMs. Just fleeting dopamine hits while your brain cells wither. Of all the habits one could try to reduce, or be mindful of, to literally save lives and countries, anybody who honestly thinks generative AI is more important is very addicted.
Also also: it’s just so shit.
I would describe it as ‘indoctrinated by Big Oil’, heh… It is awful.
The majority of text ingestion/token generation is consumed by other machines for stuff like coding assistants or corporate data processing, and this includes image ingestion. I dunno what fraction is image/video generation is, but I suspect it’s not high, as there’s really no point outside of cheap spam.
You are not wrong, and corpo AI is shit for plenty of reasons (including being needlessly power hungry when it doesn’t have to be), but I’m not relenting that this is a ‘small fish’ issue to pursue in reference to the massive waste in so many other parts of the US.
Big Oil and such delight in such distractions because it draws attention away from their more profitable and harmful sectors they’d rather people forget about.
I totally agree that each query/ picture isn’t literally burning huge amounts of energy - I wonder if we’re kind of making the same argument but I misread your first comment - but it’s also true that each cigarette doesn’t actually do that much damage to your lungs and buying a single puppy from a puppy mill isn’t funding the entire industry, just like buying a tiny ivory figurine isn’t killing any animals and buying a single share in EvilCorp isn’t funding the CEO’s baby-killing missions.
But, in a way, it kind of is. If you need that cigarette, I won’t stop you. If the ivory is antique or really special to you or whatever, we’ve all got vices, maybe also donate to an animal charity. If you really think EvilCorp isn’t that bad and the CEO only killed a few babies that one time, or if you don’t really mix your ethics with your finances or whatever, cool, everyone makes their own moral boundaries.
(I can’t think of a decent reason to buy from puppy mills, but I’m sure they exist).
But I think we all have a responsibility to make these ethical decisions. If you are adding to the AI user base, feeding it your data and training it and pumping its figures, there are a variety of legit reasons to do so, from curiosity to convenience to FOMO. And if you don’t care about the environment or wider impact of your actions, alright, rock on. We can’t all care about everything all the time.
But in my (unsolicited) opinion, when you use it with no decent reason or benefit, you are prioritising your fleeting whims over the deadliest threat to the world. It’s like owning an oversized gas guzzling car (personal choice) and leaving it to idle for hours at a time because it saves 15 seconds in the morning. Weird example, but to my mind it’s the same.
I’m not going to shit on people’s hobbies, but I used to throw my cigarette ends down drains because I thought it was tidier, until I found out that nope, really not good for the drains or water system. So I bought a little portable ashtray. I have no particular passion for drains and don’t smoke that much when I’m not near a bin or ashtray, but it wasn’t a huge sacrifice to buy an ashtray. The cumulative damage to the ecosystem seemed to outweigh the personal convenience of dropping my cigarette end there, so I couldn’t really justify contributing to a bad thing that wouldn’t affect me if I didn’t need to.
But - I still see lots of cigarette ends on the floor. Maybe they haven’t heard about the damage it causes, maybe they have different moral priorities, maybe they were in a real hurry; everybody makes their own decision. I just wish more people would make that decision, rather than using it because it’s there and everyone else is.
AI doesn’t have to be a corporate nightmare. It can be self-hosted, or hosted by a third party that doesn’t log or train on anything (which is extremely common).
And if you’re concerned with the relatively marginal energy use of inference; use Cerebras or Groq (not Grok) or Huawei, to get away from Nvidia and the crazy clocks they run chips at. Or even just something like GLM or Deepseek that’s deployed with quite reasonable efficiency, on peanuts for hardware.
The fundamental issue is corporate enshittification, basically. And that the vast majority of folks, unfortunately, do take the shitty Big Tech options because they’re the loudest, and no-one knows there are better, cheaper, and nicer options.