AI is just what crypto bros moved onto after people realized that was a scam. It’s immature technology that uses absurd amounts of energy for a solution in search of a problem, being pushed as the future, all for the prospect of making more money. Except this time it’s being backed by major corporations because it means fewer employees they have to pay.
There are legitimate uses of AI in certain fields like medical research and 3D reconstruction that aren’t just a scam. However, most of these are not consumer facing and the average person won’t really hear about them.
It’s unfortunate that what you said is very true on the consumer side of things…
I would love to see an AI make an ANSYS model that isn’t shit. They might be able to make cute pictures, but when it comes to making models for CFD or FEA, AI is a complete waste of time.
energy for a solution in search of a problem,
Except this time it’s being backed by major corporations because it means fewer employees they have to pay.
Ah yes the classic it is useless and here is a use for it logic.
I take it you haven’t had to go through an AI chat bot for support before huh
I have and don’t see the relevance. The argument is that it is useless and then mentions a use case. If you want to say it’s crap I won’t argue the point but you can’t say X and ~X.
Crypto has been hitting all time highs this year; there’s just more bros than before.
Tell that to my wallet. I hold a little crypto and it’s down over 50%
Crypto has been hitting all time highs this year; there’s just more bros than before.
There’s a sucker born every minute
Summary:
- AI’s rapid growth has transformed digital life, but its significant environmental impact remains largely unchecked.
- AI-powered features can consume up to 10 times more electricity than traditional searches, potentially equating to a country’s power usage.
- The proliferation of energy-intensive data centers powering AI is outpacing the electric grid’s capacity, forcing utilities to maintain fossil fuel plants for reliability.
- Estimates suggest AI could account for 9% of U.S. energy demand by 2030, substantially contributing to climate change.
- Lack of industry transparency and mandatory reporting makes quantifying AI’s full environmental toll difficult.
- Tech companies negotiate discounted utility rates, shifting costs to ratepayers and reducing incentives for energy efficiency.
- Government regulation has been slow and industry-influenced, focusing on hypothetical future risks over current, tangible harms.
- The burden of AI’s environmental impact disproportionately falls on Global South communities where data centers are located.
- Tech companies resist mandatory disclosures, prioritizing profits over sustainability while the public bears the physical costs.
Just curious. Do your summaries are made by you, human?
Used AI to summarize article about misuse of AI.
Genius.
Using AI the correct way 👌
Where are all the people that were so damn pissed with Bitcoins power consumption now?
Or was it never about the power consumption in the first place and now that little Timmy has an Ai buddy the waste of electricity is fine. SMH
It’s far more important that every country fixes how it legally generates power that isn’t green. Make burning coal illegal already.
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I’d think there’s some serious god damn overlap between the groups that are pissed about these things.
Or was it never about the power consumption in the first place and now that little Timmy has an Ai buddy the waste of electricity is fine. SMH
I don’t think I want to waste my energy on hating these hypocrite Timmies since I haven’t yet encountered a single one of them.
It’s a different debate because bitcoiners lose literally nothing to green power laws and banning coal. AI users would see a reduction in output quality/speed.
Crypto bros would definitely not be happy, because it would make mining less profitable
You’re literally responding to an article criticising the power consumption of ai. What do you mean where are the people? They’re right here.
The one article that’s popped up in months of nothing. There was a larger response from people when it was something they saw as worthless using large quantities of power compared to the “helpful ai” that’s consuming the power now.
Shows that it never was about the environment in the first place. Hypocrites.
Criticisms of Bitcoin didn’t really become popular until years after its introduction. Give it time.
So-called “AI” is worthless too so they’ll get their turn.
We hate both.
All of this just to give rich shareholders even more money.
Don’t worry folks, if we all stop using plastic straws and take 30 second showers, we’ll be able to offset 5% of the carbon emissions this AI has!
Google ghg emissions in 2023 are 14.3 million metric tons. Which are a ridiculous percentage of global emissions.
Commercial aviation emissions are 935.000 million metric tons by year.
So IDK about plastic straws or google. But really if people stopped flying around so much that would actually make a dent on global emissions.
Don’t get me wrong, google is a piece of shit. But they are not the ones causing climate change, neither is AI technology. Planes, cars, meat industry, offshore production… Those are some of the truly big culprits.
But they are not the ones causing climate change
The owners of google are capitalists. They are as responsible for climate change as any other capitalist.
Capitalists serve customers and do not operate in a vacuum. This finger pointing does nothing productive.
Capitalists have captured regulation and to a large extent democracy in the US. So finger pointing towards them is entirely useful. Especially given they spend good money to point the finger at us.
Capitalists
serve customershoard wealth through reckless profiteering irregardless of the costs to the rest of human society and do not operate in a vacuum.FTFY. I do agree with your last part, though. The political racketeer establishments that enable them and the fascist security institutions that protect them are equally as culpable as they are.
Somebody is hitting a homerun!
Chad
I’d rather we give up AI than give up meat or flying. I am not taking a ship half way across the world.
You do you. But other people may have other priorities.
Anyway, how many times have an user to use an AI to even come close to a single commercial plate through the Atlantic? It may be a freaking lot.
You giving away AI, or even forcing all humandkind to do so, might as well do nothing as far as climate change is concerned.
I still believe there are other priorities over one trip every couple of years. Flight is one of the greatest achievements of humanity and I firmly believe it is important to visit other cultures.
I’m not sure about that. I live in a country that is suffering a lot because of tourism. And I’m not very fond of it.
Sometimes I prefer that people would just read our Wikipedia page instead of coming here.
I gather from your comments that you live in Spain, right? You guys suffer from all the 20€ flights going there from other European countries. At those prices you’ll mostly encounter human trash (I know this because I’m from Germany and the the majority of Germans visiting Spain are morons), so I feel with you. These cheap flights need to stop. I’d like to see the kerosene taxed fully for European flights. Have the prices be something to think about.
It’s great if you can afford it. If you can afford to fly even a couple times a year you’re pretty privileged. I can’t, and I’m still privileged.
i cant afford to ride airplanes. you are welcome.
This person has no personality!
He needs to travel!
well pay me the tickets and i will gladly do more international flights everywhere.
Bro… Most peoples “personalities” revolves around “travel”
Telling them to stop brain dead tourism will not accept! Fuck your climate
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…You joined 3 days ago. 🤣
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You were definitely a redditor, right?
That’s an insult around this here fora, boy
Sadly, yes.
Sounds like not using Google search would be a way more effective way of reducing CO2
And it’s only 10x more useless :)
I’m surprised it’s only 10x. Running a prompt though a llm takes quite a bit of energy, so I guess even the regular searches take more energy than I thought.
Same. I think I’ve read that a single GPT-4 instance runs on a 128 GPU cluster, and ChatGPT can still take something like 30s to finish a long response. A H100 GPU has a TDP of 700w. Hard to believe that uses only 10x more energy than a search that takes milliseconds.
Wow AI is just so amazing
whats up with these shit ass titles? It’s not even REMOTELY hidden, it takes two fucking seconds of googling to figure this shit out.
The entire AI industry was dependent on GPU hardware manufacturers, and nvidia is STILL back ordered (to my knowledge)
This is like saying that crypto has a hidden energy cost.
It’s hidden in the sense that the normal user does not see the cost on their energy bill. You perform a search and get the result in milliseconds. That makes it easy to imagine that it’s just a minor operation. It’s not like driving a car and watching the the fuel gauge and see the consumption.
Of course one can research how much energy Google consumes and find out the background – IF you’re interested. But most people just use tech and do not question or even understand.
it’s hidden in the same sense that your closet is hidden.
Yet most people know they also have closets.
As long as we are talking about crypto, and I know this is shocking, turns out some people are using it for unsavory acts. It is okay if you want to sit down.
my brother in christ people are making child pornography using generative AI. Everything sucks and is awful.
I don’t know what you want from me. I think it was pretty clear I was talking about crypto and badmouthing it. I won’t touch the child pornography generative AI issue with a ten foot pole and Covid mask.
nothing, i’m just making the point that it doesnt matter what you look at, there’s terrible shit happening everywhere.
Some people? The vast majority of the crypto eco system is grifters and get-rich-quick rubes.
Perhaps you need a seat then. Lol
There’s cocaine on literally every US Dollar and that currency is backed by oil, relatively speaking crypto is cleaner
I am against the drug war and I think the cocaine thing was an urban legend. Also the US dollar is not backed up by oil.
The US Dollar is not only backed by oil, but also American banking imperialism.
Im against the war on drugs too. But speaking of drugs, weed is schedule 1, where Xanax is schedule 4 (low risk of abuse). It’s completely upside down and not accurate. That said, the harmfulness of the substance and being for or against the war on drugs is completely separate from the fact that there’s cocaine on literally every single dollar bill. Money is the dirtiest thing in general, and by those metrics, the US Dollar is dirtier
The US Dollar is not only backed by oil, but also American banking imperialism.
Keep your story straight next time.
from the fact that there’s cocaine on literally every single dollar bill.
Prove it.
92%, I may have used the word literally figuratively, but so does every other American
That’s the proof man, it’s literally on the bills. We can literally see it
Also, what do you mean keep my story straight next time? It’s not controversial at all that the US gets involved in military conflicts for oil or financial control (neorealism, neoliberalism). Oil is just one of the many incentives which makes the USD arguably dirty
92% == 100%
For you it might be clear. For the overwhelming majority of people, this is news. People don’t know shit about tech. Most would assume the AI thingy does its thing on the local computer.
Or there are bigger fish to fry like coal power plants and wasted idle etc. shit Google’s AI search results are wasteful in some cases but I’ve found it to actually improve my experience but I use a mix of search engines. You can always use one without AI or turn it off. It’s being pushed into almost every search though which I really don’t think is useful, and it would be best if they cached the answers instead of regeneration on command. They may cache some though.
If only they did what DuckDuckGo did and made it so it only popped up in very specific circumstances, primarily only drawing from current summarized information from Wikipedia in addition to its existing context, and allowed the user to turn it off completely in one click of a setting toggle.
I find it useful in DuckDuckGo because it’s out of the way, unobtrusive, and only pops up when necessary. I’ve tried using Google with its search AI enabled, and it was the most unusable search engine I’ve used in years.
DDG has also gotten much worse since the introduction of AI features.
I haven’t had any problems myself.
In fact, I regularly use their anonymized LLM Chat tab to help out with restructuring data, summarizing some more complex topics, or finding some info that doesn’t readily appear near the top of search. It’s made my search experience (again, specifically in my circumstance) much better than before.
If only Google had a working search engine before AI
Yes, but now we can get much worse results and three pages of ads for ten times the energy cost. Capitalism at its finest.
This is terrible. Why don’t we build nuclear power plants, rollout a carbon tax, and put incentives for companies to make their own energy via renewables?
You know the shit that we should have been doing before I was born.
I wonder what the power consumption of getting to the information in the summary is as a whole when using a regular search, clicking on multiple links, finding the right information and extracting the relevant parts. Including the expenditures of energy by the human performing the task and everything that surrounds the activity.
There are real concerns surrounding AI, I wonder if this is truly one of them or if it’s just poorly researched ragebait.
The results used to be better too. AI just produces junk faster.
I don’t know if lemmians (lemmings?) live in the same world I live in; I find AI a HUGE productivity boost, in search, writing, generation, research.
Of course one has to check results carefully, it won’t remove the need for quality checks and doing stuff yourself. But as a sparring partner, an idea creator and an assistant, I am convinced people who make use of Claude/GPT etc will outperform people who don’t by a wide margin.
that’s gonna be mighty useful when we’ve destroyed the planet. Also, you are not working with AI. You are working with a LLM.
Against bunker oil shipping, coal power plants, diesel cars, cement, our consumate appetite for plastic, gas and oil based heating, air travel, cooling buildings to 19 C when the outside is 38 C, ammonia based fertiliser, fast fashion, maintaining perfect green lawns in desert environments, driving monster trucks with one passengers on 18-lane highways, dismantling public transport, building glass skyscrapers with no external shade, buying new TVs every second year etc etc I think AI’s reputation as a carbon emitter, especially considering most of Azure, CG and AWS runs on renewables, is overblown and used as a battering ram in a larger battle that comes from very real concerns about how AI is changing our society.
- if each of those contributors to wrecking our planet points to the other causes as a justification to not limit their own damage, we’re fucked
- it’s not AI. It’s large language models. Glorified statistical text prediction without any originality. It just appears to some naive humans as original because it regurgitates ideas to them that other people have had but they just hadn’t heard before
- despite the misnaming, I agree that there’s a real concern that it makes the majority of users even more stupid than mankind on average already is :/
most of Azure, CG and AWS runs on renewables
Yeah definitely believing that
It’s more that there is a vocal minority against it. I’d guess most of us are mostly neutral about it, we see the problems and the benefits but don’t see the need to comment everywhere about our feelings towards it.
How can you trust whatever you search for after the glue on pizza thing?
You’re confusing what I said as being solely about search.
No, I’m just addressing the search part. How can you trust it?
I’m not saying I can. I don’t use Google, haven’t for years, so can’t make statements about the quality of its search. Intuitively search isn’t benefitting from the use of AI.
You wrote:
I find AI a HUGE productivity boost, in search
Then when pushed, you walk it back:
search isn’t benefitting from the use of AI
Why make your initial comment of support if you just walk back on it? Got some money riding on it or something?
I find LLM’s to be entirely worthless in any kind of engineering analysis or scientific reference. It has done nothing but hinder the design process and we have moved entirely away from it as it’s a complete joke.
We will enter another AI winter soon enough.
Ai devinetively has its use cases and boosts productivity if used right. The stuff google did is just the most bullshit ever seen. Its an example of useless Ai because of the “need” to use Ai.
Ok that we agree entirely. Google is worried that their investors will worry because their investors are too dumb to understand that LLMs and Search are two separate things and one isn’t necessarily better because it uses the other.
Wait till they learn about the environmental impacts of the oil industry, or the plastic industry.
