Okay, so are these 8 pages of motivated reasoning formatted like they've been submitted to Science or to Nature?
https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-2724922/v1_covered.pdf?c=1680083818
Look, you can't count the carbon emissions that people have for (check notes) existing as the "carbon cost" of the work that they do.
I can't believe this needs to be said, but: LLMs are *optional*. Humans are not.
It's being reviewed by Scientific Reports, Nature's open access title, 6th most-cited journal in the world, so close enough.
And you're spot on the the ethics of their sums.
A much more sensible comparison is the carbon cost of computing during the writing process, which is 1.6g for the AI servers and 27g for the writer's laptop.
(It'd be nice if the output was anywhere near as good as 1/16th of the writers, though..).
Highlights the CO2 cost of shitty jobs, though...
Also, it's a pre-print -- you can spout any crap you please in a pre-print, apparently 6-7% of submissions are published in Nature, and I don't think those odds are likely to be in favour for that paper.
Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)
Dragon Dave