The environmental comparison I'd be interested in seeing is between a year of heavy personal usage of LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini etc) compared to the CO2 emissions from a single passenger flight

Can I do my own personal carbon offsetting by skipping one trip a year?

Does that question even make sense?

@simon ecological damage in one area doesn't undo it in another. You shouldn't do either thing.
@scott the problem I have with that model is that, taken to its logical conclusion, I shouldn't travel by car or bus or train, or purchase manufactured goods, or turn on the heating, or - you know - live

@simon yes, if it is at all afforded to you by your society, you should avoid doing things that consume energy up until the point where we've balanced our energy use budget with the earths resources. If you do not personally have that ability, it's very understandable: collective energy use requires collective efforts to reduce usage. Change must be pressed for at the societal level.

That said, it is absurd and ridiculous to compare the necessity to heat your home to the vanity of consuming that power in the form of a fancy lying-to-you machine is so ridiculous I can't believe I actually have to say it. I have never used one of these products and I'm still alive and well.

@scott "I have never used one of these products and I'm still alive and well"

Then it's understandable that you wouldn't see why I value them more than an international flight!

I use them for a lot of things, some of it dumb but most of it genuinely useful https://simonwillison.net/series/using-llms/

Simon Willison: How I use LLMs and ChatGPT

Simon Willison’s Weblog