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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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idk if that's the intended takeaway from those numbers.
according to the faa there are on average 5500 planes in the air every day, and while i couldn't find an exact number there seem to be between 350 and 1 200 transatlantic flights every day, depending on season.
260 tons is still massive, but let's not kid ourselves. it's about equivalent to producing 12 new american-size cars.
Thank you.
Idk if LLMs can tell which number is bigger. But we already knew humans can't.
Just goes to show that you don't even need AI to spread misinformation! Haha
Frankly focusing on the carbon output of AI models is a red herring. It's not a significant part of the problem and just makes people complacent in the form of feeling like we've achieved something if it succeeds. It's not worse than stuff like video games
Focus on the actual negative effects of AI, but carbon intensity isn't a major one
I'm much more concerned about AI datacenters' use of evaporative cooling draining freshwater reserves than the carbon footprint atm
we do a lot of things for no benefit. video games, golf, horse racing, grilling... all those have far larger carbon footprints. as someone else said, focus on the actual negatives of generative ai, like the proven cognitive decline and loneliness.
in the comment i replied to you only mention that there's no benefit, and you replied to me talking about carbon footprint.
"AI" and related tech does a lot of useful translation work. It translates speech to text, one language to another, maybe skilled people can do these jobs more elegantly and correctly, but certainly not more cheaply.
ChatGPT has the most marketing, but it's only part of the AI ecosystem... and honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if other AI products are bigger now. Practically every time someone does a Google search, Gemini AI spits out a summary whether you wanted it or not — and Google processes more than 8 billion search queries per day. That's a lot of slop.
There are also more bespoke tools that are being pushed aggressively in enterprise. Microsoft's Copilot is used extensively in tech for code generation and code reviews. Ditto for Claude Code. And believe me, tech companies are pushing this shit hard. I write code for a living, and the company I work for is so bullish on AI that they've mandated that us devs have to use it every day if we want to stay employed. They're even tracking our usage to make sure we comply... and I know I'm not alone in my experience.
All of that combined probably still doesn't reach the same level of CO² emissions as global air travel, but there are a lot more fish in this proverbial pond than just OpenAI, and when you add them all up, the numbers get big. AI usage is also rising much, much faster than air travel, so it's really only a matter of time before it does cross that threshold.
they list the others in the article.