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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.

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[-] MisterFrog@lemmy.world 2 points 22 hours ago

WHO IS USING AI TO RESPOND TO EMAILS? Like, by the time to "craft" the ultimate response, you could have just written the email.

This may be my bias as an engineer (not software, but chemical), there's not really much faffing about in an email. You just politely respond, or politely make a query. It's not very long, typically, and even if it is, an LLM isn't gonna help you.

You don't have to sugar coat anything unless there's some fuck up you're trying to soften. You just go "Hi xyz, could you please clarify when the design temperature is changing here?".

Wtf is there you can use an LLM for in an email?

I have only used it for software troubleshooting, as it's quite nifty there, even if it's information is out of date, it gets versions confused, etc, still gets me out of a bind or spits out random ideas to try.

But emails? Those short form messages, just barely longer than texts?

Are we actually serious? It's not a report

[-] Cevilia 74 points 2 days ago

🏞 Please consider the environment before issuing a return-to-office mandate

[-] oplkill@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

This! There are no reason go back to office for some professions like programmers, managers, etc

This is the right response - RTO is much worse for the climate than GenAI.

[-] Trihilis@ani.social 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

So I'm not saying RTO is worse than AI or vice versa. But do you have any data to back up that statement. I've been seeing nothing but news about AI data centers being an absolute nightmare for the planet. And even more so when corrupt politicians let then be built in places that already have trouble with maintaining normal water levels.

I get both are bad for the environment.

Editie: thanks for all the sources everyone. TIL

[-] Showroom7561@lemmy.ca 3 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Proof was during COVID:

In many megacities of the world, the concentration of PM and NO2 declined by > 60% during the lockdown period. The air quality index (AQI) also improved substantially throughout the world during the lockdown. SOURCE

[-] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Well, real quick, my drive to the office is ~10 miles. My car gets ~3.1 miles/kwh. So let's say I use 3 KWH per trip, two trips a day, makes it 6KWH. A typical LLM request uses 0.0015KWH of electricity, so my single day commute in my car uses ~4000 LLM queries worth of electricity.

Yeah RTO is way worse, even for an EV that gets 91MPGe.

The thing is: those AI datacenters are used for a lot of things, LLM's usage amount to about 3% of usage, the rest is for stuff like image analysis, facial recognition, market analysis, recommendation services for streaming platforms and so on. And even the water usage is not really the big ticket item:

The issue of placement of data centers is another discussion, and i agree with you that placing data centers in locations that are not able to support them is bullshit. But people seem to simply not realize that everything we do has a cost. The US energy system uses 58 trillion gallons of water in withdrawals each year. ChatGPT use about 360 million liters/year, which comes down to 0.006% of Americas water usage / year. An average american household uses about 160 gallons of water / day; ChatGPT requests use about 20-50 ml/request. If you want to save water, go vegan or fix water pipes.

[-] inb4_FoundTheVegan@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I'm on my phone so I can't fully crunch the numbers, but I took a few minutes to poke around and I think I found the stats to put both of these in perspective.

https://www.arbor.eco/blog/ai-environmental-impact

Each query sends out roughly 4.32 grams of CO₂e (MLCO2), which may seem trivial on its own but adds up millions of queries a day, and you're looking at a staggering daily output. 1 million messages sent to ChatGPT is equivalent to 11,001 miles driven by an average gasoline-powered passenger vehicle

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle

The average passenger vehicle emits about 400 grams of CO2 per mile.

So yikes and without a doubt unsustainable energy usage, but comparing this to wikis article on COVID environmental impacts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_on_the_environment?wprov=sfla1

In 2020, carbon dioxide emissions fell by 6.4% or 2.3 billion tonnes globally.

My napkin math says that we would need ~532,407,407 AI queries to match the 2020 work for home drop, but unfortunately, Chat GPT alone is estimating 2.5 billion prompts, daily.

I started writing this assuming the opposite was true but unfortunately AI is a bigger environmental impact than an RTO. Which is honestly shocking. I hope someone corrects my math and tells me it isn't this dire. Work from should be the norm, but AI is truly just a massive environmental burden.

[-] a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

you got an error in magnitude there: its 5.32*10¹⁴ requests, so 532 407 407 407 407 requests

(2.3 × billion tonnes)/(4.32 grams) 2.3 billion tonnes = 2.3 trillion kilos = 2.3 quadrillion grams ≈ 532 407 000 000 000 requests needed for equivalence to Covid CO2 drop ≈ 912 500 000 000 requests made per year calculator output below:

912 500 000 000/532 407 407 407 407
≈ 0.001 7%
(2.5 × billion) × 365
= 912 500 000 000
(2.3 × billion tonnes)/(4.32 grams)
≈ 532 407 407 407 407

See what i mean? Stop ChatGPT, achieve 0,0017% of the reduction that Covid brought.

[-] ivanafterall@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

To put this into perspective: imagine smoking 4.32 grams of weed every day and imagine how that would add up.

its more like 0.0017% of 4.32grams of weed, see my response above

[-] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 93 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Ooooh, I'm totally adding that to my email signature.

Aaaaaaand done.

[-] scytale@piefed.zip 26 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

If you don't mind the additional real estate, it would also be great to have a version where "printing" is still there but struck out, for people who aren't aware of the original.

[-] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 37 points 2 days ago

Had to shrink the font a bit; looks better all on one line.

[-] Technoworcester@feddit.uk 2 points 1 day ago

Awesome. Thanks. Using this!

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[-] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 2 days ago

To be fair they never cared about environment. A paper is something easy to recycle and certainly not the most polluting material to produce.

It was more about saving money, greenwashing and pushing a conversion towards digital archiving (which is much more efficient that paper)

[-] _AutumnMoon_ 12 points 2 days ago

Please consider the environment before sending me an email, seriously, I won't read it.

[-] jmc@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
[-] slazer2au@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Na, that's too useful the point is to be virtue signalling

[-] Chozo@fedia.io 17 points 2 days ago

Text generation uses hardly any energy at all, though. Most phones do it locally these days. In fact, it likely takes less energy to generate an email in 5 seconds than it would take for you to type it out manually in 5 minutes with the screen on the whole time.

[-] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 10 points 2 days ago

I want to see the "cease and desist you may not use my facebook posts without my express permission" type footers but against AI to start showing up

[-] stevedice@sh.itjust.works 14 points 2 days ago
[-] cdf12345@lemmy.zip 17 points 2 days ago

“If everyone is littering, it’s not a big deal if I throw the occasional can on the ground”

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.

[-] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 2 points 1 day ago

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

[-] a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

a) many people swear by it - is it so useless then? it's a personal question, and the answer is not the same for everyone. ChatGPT is one of the most downloaded apps worldwide, so to assume that all of those people do not gain something from it cannot be right. b) people do a lot of useless things that all have a climate cost, but noone bats an eye when someone says they watched 2 hours of 4k video, which uses a lot more ressources than Chatbots. c) chatbots that noone interacts with do not consume resources in a meaningful way, since you have to make a request for that - the greeting will be hardcoded in 99% of cases. d) i agree that the amount of VC money inflates AI usage, but VC money does this with everything: dotcom bubble, 2008 crash (housing bubble), crypto bubble, nft bubble... the difference here is that people actually have personal use scenarios, regardless of VC money. e) I agree that opt-in should be the default, i'm no fan of google's bot, but i actually just don't use google, i use mullvad leta for most things, and i'm waiting for the rollout of the european search index that qwant and ecosia created - it went live in france recently and i'm excited to try it out when it starts here!

You know what's funny? i don't even use ChatGPT, i rely on locally running models - and i'm pretty sure my GPU is less efficient than the setup in a data center.

[-] jj4211@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

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.

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[-] a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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

[-] npdean@lemmy.today 8 points 2 days ago

I am a small part of the problem, so I am not a problem.

[-] a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[-] blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk 2 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

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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.

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[-] HubertManne@piefed.social 13 points 2 days ago

This is the main reason I am reticent about using ai. I can get around its funtional limitations but I need to know they have brought the energy usage down.

[-] taiyang@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago

It's not that bad when it's just you fucking around having it write fanfics instead of doing something more taxing, like playing an AAA video game or, idk, run a microwave or whatever it is normies do. Training a model is very taxing, but running them isn't and the opportunity cost might even be net positive if you tend to use your gpu a lot.

It becomes more of a problem when everyone is doing it when it's not needed, like reading and writing emails. There's no net positive, it's a very large scale usage, and brains are a hell of a lot more efficient at it. This use case has gotta be one of the dumbest imaginable, all while making people legitimately dumber using it over time.

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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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