Did you know that your personal carbon footprint is huge?!?!??! (this message brought to you by the fossil fuel industry, creating the conditions you are forced to live in for the last 100+ years)
These people have tiny, pea-sized brains and think this is a good argument.
People running the forest-burning factory are telling you to take shallower breaths.
This has essentially been the main focus all through the environmentalist movement and lobbied for by the biggest polluters. Individualized, never ever look at the actual material reality. Just feel guilty for buying that avocado.
This unserious ai versus human comparison is just a variation of the same theme, with dehumanizing (eco)fashistic characteristics.
Incidentally avocados have some of the highest ratios of calories per embodied kJ of shipping of just about any produce. They’re more environmentally friendly than most other foods.
flushes 160,000 pounds of trash
well that would be a problem lol
LLM training model scraped Field Guide to Carrier Sabotage lmao
“Eats Meat”
0% chance OOP is vegan
There’s a difference: AI images annoy me and the cosplaying software engineers who like it think they’re tech geniuses for liking it.
Ok, but I got crop-dusted by someone yesterday and it was very stinky. Also annoyed me.
CHECKMATE TANKIE
“I might set off nukes, but you use fire crackers!”
Anyway what do you think about this, @ChatPPB@hexbear.net?
Yes, but in this thread, you cannot understand why you can be smart enough to argue for that. You can’t get the capacity to get the capacity to kill em all.
Nice contribution as always! I almost understood some of those words!
Well, i made the original study that was possible, you can still survive (bad vibes by way of this classic) for example, and this is not that it would be feasible to show to if it was better than not
If I’m being honest with you, I disagree.
No, I agree with the thought that in 1971 when it was not a ‘leftist’ alternative.
Well I agree with the thought in 1997, so take that you dweeb
Yeah I feel like it was very interesting to go through the irony that said it was a genocide. That the ‘anti-radicalisation’ by a totenkopf.
I mean, I think the OP has some merit to it. In this comparison something like eating beef or driving a car regularly would be setting of nukes, and non-agentic LLM usage is like a firecracker, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, water use, energy use, etc. LLMs are kinda bad for the environment, but not any worse than Netflix or Youtube for example.
There are other issues with generative “AI”, such as worsening the conditions for creative people who made it possible in the first place, turning everything into soulless slop, and ruining the education for an entire generation. Environmental impact is a very small problem on this list.
LLMs are kinda bad for the environment, but not any worse than Netflix or Youtube for example.
What are you talking about, LLMs are magnitudes more harmful/resource intensive than traditional data storage/hosting
Inference itself is exceptionally cheap, like a few Joules per token for frontier models which translates to around 1 Wh per query. Pretty much nothing. “Thinking” models and agentic use increase the usage to to ~10 Wh per query, still not that much. There are some lightweight Chinese models out there which reduce energy use for infrerence significantly, way below the 1 Wh estimate.
Information transfer energy use is completely irrelevant because it’s all just text.
Training is energy-intensive (difficult to get precise numbers, but somewhere in the hundreds of GWh for frontend models) but it is amortized over tens of billions of queries, adding perhaps another 1 Wh per query.
Streaming a YouTube video in HD quality consumes about 3 Wh per minute in total (device power use + infrastructure to transfer video), because video requires a lot of bandwidth and encoding/decoding compute.
Watching a 1-minute HD video on YouTube is about as bad as asking ChatGPT a question.
LLMs come with serious issues that we must deal with. Energy/water use is very low on that list.
Pretending inference and training are totally disentangled processes is a classic industry talking point that mainly serves to minimize usage data and generally pretends (or tries to invoke) that these models aren’t constantly retrained.
Adding the end user’s device power requirements for the YouTube video comparison and not adding it for LLM usage is disingenuous at best, obviously misleading at worst.
Water usage stats for hyperscalers are routinely not reported at all, so any numbers floating around are a combination of guesstimation and the rare (imperfect) disclosure. They also generally do not include the water usage involved in power generation, which is just another way of minimizing the numbers.
Very very obviously, resource wastage is a PR problem for AI companies, that’s why they’ve worked very hard in the last couple years to obfuscate how much they use and for what exactly, constantly downplaying the ecological cost - because they know very well that the costs are absurd. The cost in water is absurd, the cost in energy is absurd and the cost in clean air is absurd as well, as is the cost of silence.
And we haven’t even started to talk about how all these costs are generally focused on already disadvantaged communities, so the social cost is even greater than the bare resource cost.
Adding the end user’s device power requirements for the YouTube video comparison and not adding it for LLM usage is disingenuous at best, obviously misleading at worst.
YouTube is way more energy-intensive on the user’s device because of video decoding requirements, but sure, let’s add another 1 Wh of user device energy use for the LLM. It is still in the same ballpark (or less) as 1 minute of a HD YT video. It is nowhere near “magnitudes worse”.
Very very obviously, resource wastage is a PR problem for AI companies, that’s why they’ve worked very hard in the last couple years to obfuscate how much they use and for what exactly, constantly downplaying the ecological cost - because they know very well that the costs are absurd. The cost in water is absurd, the cost in energy is absurd and the cost in clean air is absurd as well, as is the cost of silence.
Focusing this much on AI energy use is detrimental to the overall goal of softening our environmental impact. There are way more serious drivers of energy and water waste. If you call the AI cost in water, energy and clean air “absurd” then what do you call the impact on all of those things by personal transportation or animal agriculture or aviation, all of which are orders of magnitude worse?
Focusing this much on AI energy use is also detrimental to the overall goal of regulating AI and softening its impact on our society. Nobody is going to take us seriously if we are complaining about energy use comparable to watching YouTube.
This forum literally has an entire community dedicated to hating on cars, another capitalist imposition in society. We hate on cars plenty here, you just have your head too far up your ass to even notice.
Do you think they will take us seriously anyways? Why are you pretending as if anyone in this administration is interested in regulating LLMs or the parasites in the tech industry at all?
You are not being reasonable or logical, because you are assuming the other side is open to a reasonable debate on the implementation of this technology. They are not. This is yet another grifting cycle from Silicon Valley, and is currently a boondoggle, with them unable to find an actual profitable consumer base for this product. Even at my most charitable, it is yet another imposition on society by the capitalist class, who are bound and determined to generate a market for this and not be left holding the bag and will destroy every other functioning market or product if they have to to generate it, even if the overall outcomes are worse, because they think it will be able to replace enough workers to offset the cost.
Yea, agricultural water waste is even more absurd, but you know, at the end of it people get to fucking eat at least. And it’s not like absurd subsidies for water intensive crops or animal ag isn’t routinely critiqued in ecologically-minded spaces generally or hexbear specifically. Same for transport.
Also, I’m not “focusing this much on AI energy use”, I don’t even care that much about the energy cost, I care about the socio-ecological cost and that is not limited to the direct energy use at all. People need clean water to live and they can’t eat tokens.
Training is energy-intensive (difficult to get precise numbers, but somewhere in the hundreds of GWh for frontend models) but it is amortized over tens of billions of queries, adding perhaps another 1 Wh per query.
“Once we’ve cut down the forest, the marginal environmental damage of turning the trees into toothpicks is actually quite low.”
This is not how any of this works. Hundreds of GWh is how much worldwide YouTube usage consumes in less than a week. If it was comparable to cutting down a forest we would be out of forests a decade ago.
If you watch an hour of YouTube daily you are using more energy (and thus water) than someone querying ChatGPT 60 times a day, even with training costs amortized.
“I’ve cut down a forest for you, now here are your toothpicks. You have to use them otherwise that forest was cut down for nothing. You should be grateful. That matchstick factory over there cut down two forests last week.”
Your analogy is quite apt actually. You are blaming people for using toothpicks and matches while they are completely irrelevant to deforestation, accounting for (rounded) 0.0% of deforestation worldwide. Interestingly, beef production is the worst issue here, accounting for ~40%.
In a similar way, all AI usage, including the much more wasteful video genAI, is accounting for ~1-2% of energy use worldwide, on the same order of magnitude as YouTube. Meanwhile personal cars is like 20%
Do they need to build dozens of gas turbines to run YouTube for me to watch it for an hour?
The AI buildout is happening so fast that the grid can’t support it, you need to account for that. Energy use is less intensive after training, but it’s still immense and happening in places without preexisting energy infrastructure. It’s the same problem with water use - it uses less water than beef, but they’re building data centers in places without the water infrastructure to support it.
They did need to build gas and coal power plants to let you watch YouTube back when it was becoming popular, yes. Their share in the new generation capacity was very high back then.
I actually 100% agree that we should not be building more datacenters. Current-gen (and even last-gen) local LLMs are very good for most applicable tasks already, and we are past the point of diminishing returns.
It’s the same problem with water use - it uses less water than beef, but they’re building data centers in places without the water infrastructure to support it.
USians are growing so much alfalfa in some of their deserts that it leaves locals without water for residential use or even drinking. It’s not a problem exclusive to data centers.
liar
Yet you participate in society
Farticipate in fartciety
versus The Chad Degrowther
- uses bicycles and trains
- average item of clothing has been owned 8 years, been worn scores of times
- knows sewing and gardening and how to build stuff with pallet wood
- owns more from thrift stores and dumpsters than newly bought stuff
- monthly trash fills up 2 grocery bags
- solar panels
- night lights from a few LEDs
- shits in compost toilets
- eats beans
- farts
💨 farts
I indeed do!
Me when I defend AI so hard I wrap around to eco-fascism.
So many things wrap back around to Eco fash its annoying.
LLM powered entirely by my farts
PoopPPB
I don’t fart, I’m the only true anti-ai environmentalist.
farts
Oh, no, how do they know? D:
the thing is we need some of those things but we dont need AI generated child sexual abuse material of some random toddler off instagram
Avocado again? How many giga tonnes of carbon dioxide is released per 1 kg of avocado for boomers to endlessly complain about
Apparently worst-case it’s about 1/12th as for the same amount of beef.
by gross tonnage or calories? and is that accounting for byproducts?
By mass, and I assume it’s including byproducts because it’s a pro-avocado talking point but can’t be sure.
ppffffrrtt
