I'm glad somebody out there is brave enough to push back against the "personal ChatGPT usage is terrible for the environment" message https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about
"If you want to prompt ChatGPT 40 times, you can just stop your shower 1 second early."
"If I choose not to take a flight to Europe, I save 3,500,000 ChatGPT searches. this is like stopping more than 7 people from searching ChatGPT for their entire lives."
@simon Using it promotes AI as a viable business model as a whole as well as (in the case of non-local models) provides usage data and training content (and money if you pay) for the companies to do further bad AI business with.
So of course, while the direct impact of one query on the environment doesn't really matter, the economical impact of you using it does indeed have an influence on the environment!
The goal has to be to make AI and its connected surveillance capitalism a non-viable business model, and refraining to use it and shunning everyone who does is a way to do that!
@the_moep shunning people who use LLMs because they are being environmentally irresponsible feels dishonest to me
There are plenty of credible arguments against irresponsible usage of LLMs, I don't like seeing people waste their time on the ones that are least credible
@simon Well while I agree that one should use the correct arguments for criticizing something I also don't think one should completely discard the personal environmental-impact argument when it comes to usage of AI.
I see the issue with that argument more in that the real cost of AI-queries are hidden from the user (and independent researchers), it's not the energy spent on the single query but the amount of resources spent to create the model and to further the development of the current approach. (Which includes discarding existing hardware or potentially even models)
Of course that is way harder to calculate but I believe that you would get closer to other things that are now generally accepted as being bad for the environment like short-range flights.
Simon Willison
Max Lee