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Study: AI writing, illustration emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans

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Re: Study: AI writing, illustration emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans

#21

Post by xcv123 »

exe34 wrote: post #15
ByQuyzzy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've encouraged a low fertility rate so that replacement migration can occur[1]. [1]: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/412547

This article suggests, in the year 2000, that replacement migration might be a way to combat low fertility rate in the west. I don't think you can encourage low fertility rate. I don't think we did in the west. I also know there's nowhere to get our replacement from once the whole world is educated. Technological accelerationism might save us, or it might doom us. It's all rather exciting, isn't it?

> I don't think you can encourage low fertility rate. I don't think we did in the west.

Pushing young women into the workplace so they can waste their lives grinding away at meaningless soul crushing fake corporate jobs instead of raising families. Degenerate Tinder/hookup culture. The "west" certainly encouraged it.

Re: Study: AI writing, illustration emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans

#22

Post by toddmorey »

This outcome of course needs the volume of writing / illustration to stay constant.

Instead AI has just flooded the market with more content in a way that’s net additive. PLUS we’ll need to consider the energy impact of the AI we’ll all need to filter all this incoming AI spam.

Re: Study: AI writing, illustration emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans

#25

Post by Wissenschafter »

mjhay wrote: post #16

A Modest Proposal for Preventing Poor Creatives from Being a Burthen to Tech Professionals or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick

Does society have an obligation to maintain a plethora of 'Poor Creatives'? What if a portion of society just decided that they must absolutely be paid for their hobby, or rich people are evil.

Capitalism has really done a number on the human pshcye.

Re: Study: AI writing, illustration emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans

#26

Post by mcpar-land »

> AI systems emit between 130 and 1,500 times less CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) per page of text generated than human writers

Wow! The planet is saved, all you have to do is not multiply these values by the number of pages generated per second-

Re: Study: AI writing, illustration emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans

#27

Post by card_zero »

From the link to the study:

> For the human writing process, we looked at humans’ total annual carbon footprints, and then took a subset of that annual footprint based on how much time they spent writing.

So, they aren't asking "does a human painter use more electricity to do a painting than an AI?" ... they are asking "is it more energy efficient for an AI to do a painting, or for a human to exist for several hours?".

That is, it doesn't take into account that the human would exist and have a carbon footprint anyway, even if not employed as an artist. It's devised as if employers created their employees, and seems to speculate about the potential energy saving in exterminating them.

> emissions of the computing devices used during the writing process are also considered

And their graphs show this as exceeding AI emission by a lot (due to AI being quick). This is a fair point, but they only needed this part. They shouldn't have thrown in the person's annual carbon footprint on top of this. Also, traditional art is presumably much less expensive in carbon.

And as somebody else pointed out, the use of devices will be part of the carbon footprint data in the first place, so it gets (partly) double-counted.

Re: Study: AI writing, illustration emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans

#28

Post by kristjansson »

Nevermind the total absence of an attempt to control for quality, or, y'know, that the human goes on breathing after she finishes drawing, there are some real problems here

1. the human CO2e takes national, annual averages of CO2e and attributes the fraction of a year it takes to make a drawing to that drawing. they then _add_ to that the operating cost of whatever machine the person is using, which presumably is already a component of the national individual average?

2. The 'ChatGPT' baseline is GPT-3, not -3.5 or -4.

3. Training CO2e is from a cite I can't access, but is based on GPT-3 only.

4. They cite to some guy's post on Medium to estimate ChatGPT inference CO2e!? That admits it doesn't know the number of queries per day, or the compute time used, or the energy per compute (besides the TDP of A100s), or the carbon intensity of that energy???

This is a mess, and doesn't deserve a Nature publication.

Re: Study: AI writing, illustration emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans

#29

Post by 082349872349872 »

CharlesW wrote: post #20
hawski wrote: post #6

I will only mention that I don't see LLM output as overly satisfactory. Now. I would compare this to how humans use more carbon to move than a car for example. This could lead to a conclusion that we should stop moving and use more efficient propulsion to move. In car centered societies people move less and then need to exercise after hours more to have any sort of fitness at all. Of course there is a grunt body (and…

> I will only mention that I don't see LLM output as overly satisfactory. This is changing very quickly, but even today you many not be aware of how well LLMs can create plausible drafts if you haven't seen what Claude 3 Opus can do with good prompting.

Also, most extant text (and even more extant illustration) doesn't have to be good

Re: Study: AI writing, illustration emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans

#30

Post by kevindamm »

nullorempty wrote: post #4

I am sure AI reading the texts and AI looking at art produces less co2 as well.

Depends on whether the generators are running, or if the power company it's hooked to is using coal, oil or gas... or when the standby generators spin up, if they're one of these.
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