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 Thanks for sharing! That graph about half-way down is quite telling...
> …if we’re fretting over a few queries a day while having a beef burger for dinner, heating our homes with a gas boiler, and driving a petrol car, we will get nowhere.
@andreagrandi @simon AFAICT the consensus among activists who know about this sort of thing is that, you're right, we're not getting anywhere.
This was a good read:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n02/brett-christophers/so-much-for-paris
As well as the pieces mentioned, the author there has a book "The Price Is Wrong" which outlines the dynamics, somewhat depressingly.
> For the regular or even relatively high user of text-based LLMs: stop stressing about the energy and carbon footprint. It’s not a big deal, and restraining yourself from making 5 searches a day is not going to make a difference. In fact, it might have a net negative impact because you’re losing out on some of the benefits and efficiencies that come from these models.
👀 Noted.
@simon Counterpoint: the environmental impact of individuals' personal use of genAI ("here's my cute action figure!" etc) may be negligible, but in aggregate it arguably has a massive role to play in legitimising the current wave of data centre buildouts by hyperscalers, VCs etc. And for now [*] that's only possible through undermining or abandoning prior Net Zero commitments.
[*] Future visions of yeeting data centres into space notwithstanding: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/eric-schmidt-apparently-bought-relativity-space-to-put-data-centers-in-orbit/
@m Well, outside temperatures don't really mean that much above the atmosphere. The solar heat could be shielded against relatively well (see JWST). But getting the waste heat away is much more difficult in a vacuum without access to cool water.
I'm uncertain about the radiation shielding, though. Those cubesats demonstrate that it be easy (as did Ingenuity), but I don't know for certain.
@Smoljaguar Oops, yeah, I forgot that. Though you do not want to go outside of of earths magnetic field.
All in all, I think this is just hype. It doesn't make sense at all, even if you require 3x as much solar arrays on earths surface, it'd still be way cheaper to build and maintain.
... it would however pour some of that investor money into the space industry, which I wouldn't object to.
@simon As a first and very accurate approximation, "carbon footprint" is whatever you pay for something.
The best way to reduce your environmental impact is to spend less money.
@camertron complex topic: turns out "search" covers a ton of different use cases
Navigational searches (take me to the official website for company X / that article I read last week about Y) are a bad fit for LLMs
Some informational searches ("how do you get an HTML video tag to default to muted audio) are good
And then things like "what arguments do people generally make about why rent control is a good idea" (still arguwbly a "search" task) are much better for LLMs than regular search
I think the cheatsheet from Masley at least starts to address this, but I'd like to learn more about this area, too.
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