Mastodawn

Simon Willison Apr 29, 2025

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."

Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment - a cheat sheet

The numbers clearly show this is a pointless distraction for the climate movement

Andy Masley

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Simon Willison May 6, 2025

Here's a follow-up by someone with a whole lot more credibility than myself or Andy: Hannah Ritchie is "Head of Research at Our World in Data, and a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford" and runs a high quality sustainable energy blog https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/carbon-footprint-chatgpt

What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT?

Very small compared to most of the other stuff you do.

Sustainability by numbers

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Cameron Dutro May 6, 2025

@simon this is great, but I really wish people would stop using LLMs as search engines.

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Simon Willison May 6, 2025

@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

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Cameron Dutro

@simon 🤔 Hmm, I hadn't thought of it that way, but I see what you mean. I suppose my concern mainly stems from my observation that people expect eg. ChatGPT to work exactly like Google search and treat the response as correct without checking sources. Just the other day it tried to link me to a non-existent Rust crate, for example.