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.
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
you need to generate about 2 million emails (using qwen) for the carbon emission of one transatlantic flight, personal use is definitely not the power hungry shit you imagine
I am a small part of the problem, so I am not a problem.
i don't know what amount of energy and water LLM's or image generation use, but you vastly overestimate it if you react like this.
If you don't have your screen on power save after 15 seconds of non-use, rethink it - 8 minutes of screen time assuming a 30W monitor equals about 1 ChatGPT request, and that's including the training of the model and the production of the hardware it's running on.
If it cost any real amount of money, don't you think that people would have to pay for that? ChatGPT has 400m users, and only 11m actually pay for it.
E: Something else to set into relation: Charging your phone for about 40 minutes using slow charging (5W) is one request. Water use? 10-25ml water per request - a 500ml bottle lasts you 20-50 questions.
Gaming? ChatGPT uses the energy of 20000 households (not bad for serving 400m users and around 1b requests/day). Fortnite alone uses more than 400000 households, and noone preaches into my ear to stop playing fortnite because it's bad for the climate. (and i don't play fortnite lol)
I never had a car, i have flown 4 times in my life, i rarely eat meat. I can generate 10000 requests per day if i cared to and wouldn't have a chance reaching even the basic wastefulness that a american household is.
The same as every new service over the past 20 years. Start with free, then when they're hooked add the advertising, paywalls and ramp up the enshitification to the Max. You need to grab market share with a loss leader, dominate and become the defacto standard before you turn your users into money providers.
But even with a loss leader you cannot crank up the price stupidly high if the costs per request were prohibitive; ChatGPT subscriptions cost 20$/month. API pricing for the most expensive option is 10k$/1Million Tokens, so it's a buck per 100 tokens.
an AI center in Texas was using 460 Million gallons of water, so much that residents were told to cut back on showering to accommodate it.
Yeah, it's stupid that they built it where it's not supported by the necessary infrastructure. btw, do you know what happens after they use it to cool the servers? it gets placed back into the river, it doesn't disappear. this situation is an infrastructure issue, not an AI issue.
This post linked elsewhere in the thread was pretty insightful.
I think they're pointing out the 180-turn in so-called "priorities." Companies once claimed to want something done for the "sake of the environment," but now they have no problem using resource-intensive AI without any acknowledgement of how bad it is for the environment.
Both things (avoiding LLM written mail and the paper printouts) are meaningless greenwashing gestures in comparison to - for example - the additional car use due to "return to office"-bullshit.
That's true. I don't disagree with you, I just think we're reading this post differently.
Companies lie about their reasons all the time, especially when they claim they're doing something for the environment. I interpreted this post as another example pointing out their hypocrisy, not as "this is the one and only thing companies lie about."
The basic assumption of the post is that GenAI is particularly energy and water hungry, which is not true. The energy my computer used while commenting under this post, which i can estimate to about 300W since my first comment, equals about 300 requests. It would have been climate friendlier to generate my responses with ChatGPT instead of typing them out.