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.
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.
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.
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