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.’
Considering how bad LLMs/‘ai’ are with power consumption and water usage a new useless tag email footer should be made.
Stop it, you guys.
“If everyone is littering, it’s not a big deal if I throw the occasional can on the ground”
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 alfalfa 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.
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 the difference between pointing out the environmental impacts of AI compared to the environmental impacts of heating/air conditioning, industry, transportation etc. is there’s useful output from one and the other just creates low quality slop.
Most of the use of AI right now is entirely pointless. It exists purely because of the AI bubble and eventually companies won’t be burning queries on annoying sales chat bots that the user isn’t even interacting with or inaccurate search result summaries that you can’t reasonably turn off
For climate sure, though local impact by focusing so much demand in such small geography does create outsized impacts for that local area in terms of local energy and water.
More like, “If I focus on being an asshole to people throwing cans on the ground, I don’t have to stop using my car”