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Only if that same warning is attached to literally everything else you do. It's unfair to single out AI for using energy.
by wmf 1y ago
Only if that same warning is attached to literally everything else you do. It's unfair to single out AI for using energy.
- SoftTalker 1y agoBut "asking ChatGPT" is something people do so casually without there being any apparent clues of the costs associated with that. I guess that is true of pretty much everything online though. Even driving your car around you at least are somewhat aware of the gas you are burning.
- asdff 1y agoThat could be solved by charging more for the service. That is the only reason you are aware of the gas burning after all, you aren't conducting your own aq test you are noticing you are filling up twice a week at $50 a tank.
- appreciatorBus 1y agoI would bet most ppl drive around with very little awareness of how much it’s costing, either in money or environmental impact. Many people I’ve met seem to measure efficiency by how much it costs to fill up the tank.
- bilbo0s 1y agoEven more fundamentally, think about how much carbon running a cup of water from your faucet produces. No matter where you live, this is more carbon than an LLM prompt generates. Or, even worse God forbid, think about how much carbon is produced to create a single bottle or carton of water. Then consider how casually people down bottles of water.
- blululu 1y agoCan you source that? A lot of places have gravity fed reservoirs that are energy positive/neutral (LA, San Francisco and New York all rely on gravity fed reservoirs that were built before energy intensive pumping was practical). There are some costs but they are pretty small per gallon.
- SilasX 1y agoI’m assuming that calculation is amortizing the cost of running the water system (including wastewater treatment) adding the cost pumping it to the point that gravity can push it through the pipes. It’s never free.
- 4ndrewl 1y agoThe utility of having clean water is arguably higher than that of being able to create a steampunk-style of a cat in a suit.
- zdp7 1y agoI'm pretty sure this is false. Here's my reasoning. A google search claims water use uses 12.7% of US energy. Another search gave 11.7% US energy goes to powering AI (projected to increase to roughly 25% by 2030). Taking into account hydropower power provides 6.2% of US energy, I feel comfortable saying your statement isn't true. To further strengthen my statement, I would like to point out another statistic. NPR gives us an estimate of 300K gallons of water use/day to cool the average data center. That pretty much guarantees an LLM query produces more carbon than my filling a cup from a gravity fed water system filled by rain.
- phillipcarter 1y agoThey're aware of the price they pay for the gas, not the emissions. I would wager that the mass ignorance of the impact of fossil fuels (and rubber on roads) that the broader population has is a significant reason why we're in this climate mess today.
- jbm 1y ago> rubber on roads Funny how this suddenly became a thing after electrification became a thing. Need to find a new way to wag the finger after all.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoWell many of my fellow Americans would only accept an EV if it's gigantic, and even though I can't leave the house without seeing a Prius or a RAV4 hybrid, the news acts like it's gas versus electric as if Toyota hadn't solved this twenty years ago
- phillipcarter 1y agoIt's always been a thing? I'm pro-electrification, BTW.
- floxy 1y ago>It's always been a thing? Is there a way to quantify this? My experience as well is that the tire particulate pollution has mostly been an anti-EV talking point.
- jbm 1y agoI am 100% on the side of reducing pollutants — but this was never publicly seen as a major issue and I'm suspicious about the timing. The oil industry is a conglomerate of degenerates spamming boomer logic all the way down to the workers. Their memes propagate throughout society and lead to the other boomer characteristic of rewriting personal and societal history. The finger waggers now are being programmed to pretend they talked about tire particulates and the carheads are being programmed to pretend they never cared about 0-60. This another "We have always been at war with Eastasia", just like they all opposed the Iraq war from day 1 and didn't cancel the Dixie Chicks, et cetra. This may have been discussed in specialist literature somewhere but even when I did ecology courses in university circa 2001ish, I never heard about tire particulates, while I did hear a lot about greenhouse gasses. It's a concern but not a civilization ending concern like climate change. I low key resent these attempts to move goalposts to satisfy the writer's urge for negativity.
- wmf 1y ago"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." — Alfred North Whitehead Emissions should be fixed on the production side (decarbonization) not on the demand side (guilt/austerity).
- mulmen 1y agoWhile I agree in principle how does this work for fossil fuels? Is the idea that we should make extraction prohibitively expensive? Scaling up battery production makes EVs more appealing on the demand side. How do you disincentivize fossil fuel production?
- gbear605 1y agoMaking it illegal is always an option, and one that many countries are considering
- wmf 1y agoCarbon tax or something similar.
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoBatteries and EVs are the production side. Reducing demand is e.g. requiring you to drive fewer miles. You get a car that doesn't run on petroleum and CO2 goes down while vehicle miles can stay the same or go up.
- mulmen 1y ago> Batteries and EVs are the production side. That’s what I said? > Reducing demand is e.g. requiring you to drive fewer miles. Demand can be reduced by increasing fuel prices. Either at the pump through consumption tax or at production. The effect remains the same. > You get a car that doesn't run on petroleum and CO2 goes down while vehicle miles can stay the same or go up. Obviously. What does that have to do with disincentivizing fossil fuel production or consumption?
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- marcellus23 1y agohttps://simonwillison.net/2025/May/6/whats-the-carbon-footprint-of-using-chatgpt/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/6/whats-the-carbon-footpr...
- paulcole 1y agoObviously people have zero awareness of or interest in their true impact on the environment. This extends to every facet of life and is not at all limited to AI use. Do you really think the average person could within 2 orders of magnitude when estimating their carbon footprint for a year?
- sanktanglia 1y agoPeople spend hours a day mindlessly scrolling social media apps(streaming video calls to boot) that also take up water and energy usage per hour but are totally disconnected from it
- pjc50 1y agoThe real thing here is that these tools are currently in the "subsidy" phase, so the pricing doesn't reflect actual costs. Only once they've been made indispensible and impossible to remove will the prices be jacked up and the product enshittified.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agofairness to one polluter over another isn't the real issue - look at prop 65 in california; or if you're not used to this in CA, think of any time you've been on-call. alert fatigue is real and diminishes the urgency of the underlying message.
- reaperducer 1y agoIt's unfair to single out AI for using energy. Why? AI isn't a human being. We have no obligation to be "fair" to it.
- thot_experiment 1y agoYeah we do, it's basic epistemic hygiene. If you don't freak out about running your shower or microwave for a couple seconds or driving a few hundred feet you shouldn't be concerned about prompting an AI.
- reaperducer 1y agoApologizing for AI boiling the oceans sounds like a lot of whataboutism. I can picture an Elizabeth Holmesian cartoon clutching her diamond necklace. "Oh, won't somebody think of the tech billionaires?!" If you don't freak out about running your shower or microwave for a couple seconds or driving a few hundred feet The basic premise of the modern tech industry is scale. It's not one person running a microwave for a couple of seconds, it's a few billion people running a microwave for the equivalent of decades.
- tensor 1y agoIn a way the whole AI hand wringing is already the ultimate whataboutism. We’ve had irrefutable evidence of human caused climate change for over a decade at least, with dire consequences. And? Very little action. In fact, we’re now going backwards. The right way to look at this is comprehensively, not looking only at one issue. So yes let’s hand wring over AI and continue to do nothing about everything else. And we’ll probably do nothing about AI either, but the endless articles will no doubt keep people distracted.
- const_cast 1y agoExcept we do care about those things. We used to get tons of PSAs for carbon footprint. Turn off the lights when you leave a room, turn off your computer overnight, turn off the faucet when you're washing your hands. That type of thing.