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Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

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Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#181

Post by JimDabell »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #145
simonw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see people complaining that ChatGPT usage is unethical for environmental reasons all the time. Here's just the first example I found from a Bluesky search (this one focuses on water usage): https://bsky.app/profile/theferocity.bsky.social/post/3lfckq... "the famous case where a single ChatGPT query resulted in thousands of HTTP requests" Can you provide more information about that? I don't remember gearing about th…

Bluesky is a special place, I am not surprised you will bump into the sort of activists who will critique every bucket of water that go into making a hamburger there. For those of us who avoid contact with the axe grinding hoards of short form media, meeting somebody who spends any portion of their day fretting about the water usage of language models is indeed a rarity.

It’s not specific to Bluesky. I’ve seen it on Threads, X, Facebook, and Reddit. It’s a talking point for people who hate AI and they tell anybody who will listen.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#182

Post by sofixa »

Liquix wrote: post #17

~90% of the plastic debris in the ocean comes from ten rivers [0]. eight are in china/SEA. millions and billions of single-use items are sitting in warehouses and on store shelves wrapped in plastic. even before the plastic is discarded, the factories these items are produced in dump metric tons of waste into the oceans/soil with little repercussion. point is, none of our "personal lifestyle decisions" - not eating m…

One of the most imminent problems with the environment isn't due to plastic pollution (which is of course terrible, might well have unforseen ramifications via micro plastics, and is impacting negatively biodiversity), but CO2 and other gases impacting climate.

While we should strive to fix both, it's more important in the short term to limit the amount of CO2 pollution before it's too late.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#183

Post by sofixa »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #57
irishloop wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). If people collectively just ate a bit less meat and dairy, it would go a long way. Don't even have to be perfect. Just show a little bit of restraint.

Right just a little bit of restraint. On an unprecedented scale of coordination by hundreds of millions to billions of people - a scale of cooperation that has probably never occurred in human history (and there's no reason to believe it will any time soon). But sure, if people "just" did a "little", it would go a long way. Just a _little_ restraint from the entire population all at once in perpetuity. No big deal.

Yes, a big multi government marketing campaign "Just don't eat meat 1 or 2 days a week" can definitely work. E.g. friday is "Fish day" in a lot of places (education/public) due to Catholic church influences.

Just need a catchy word and campaign for "Veggie Wednesday".

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#184

Post by _cenw »

folken wrote: post #169

"personal carbon footprint" is a term invented by BP and is the single hack that derailed the environment discussion by making people personally responsible and removing the actual polluters from the discussion.

The article could indeed be written by the same kind of people, given it glances over training cost as if AI companies aren't pushing datacenter power/gpu capacities to the limit to produce incrementally better models by brute force. It all falls apart as soon as you stop individualizing the numbers and add back in all of the supposedly non-recurring (but actually recurring because we can't stop ourselves from redoing it) cost.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#185

Post by _cenw »

kaonwarb wrote: post #32
yapyap wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if your use of chatgpt saves you from a trip to the doctor I would be very concerned

Early days, but not as crazy as it sounds: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... "The LLM alone scored 16 percentage points (95% CI, 2-30 percentage points; P = .03) higher than the conventional resources group."

Would be much more interesting if this ranked based on severity of misdiagnosis. An LLM that is 50% better at diagnosing a common cold but missed sepsis 10% more often would not be an overall improvement.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#186

Post by VMG »

cyberax wrote: post #139
saagarjha wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work. Americans are about 15% of the world's emissions, of which 25% or so is transportation, of which well over half is cars. So you not driving to work is making direct impact on 2-3% of the world's overall emissions. Likewise, your decisions on all the other things, if taken in aggregate, will have a significant impact on overall…

> Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work. This is easily solved by switching to EVs. A small-size EV (perfect for personal transportation) is only slightly less CO2-efficient than rail ( https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint ). I wish the world would ditch public transit entirely. It's nothing but a misery generator. It's far better to switch to remote work and distributed cities.

Public transit is not miserable everywhere. In Central European countries it can be quite enjoyable.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#187

Post by TiredOfLife »

irishloop wrote: post #44
saagarjha wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work. Americans are about 15% of the world's emissions, of which 25% or so is transportation, of which well over half is cars. So you not driving to work is making direct impact on 2-3% of the world's overall emissions. Likewise, your decisions on all the other things, if taken in aggregate, will have a significant impact on overall…

Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). If people collectively just ate a bit less meat and dairy, it would go a long way. Don't even have to be perfect. Just show a little bit of restraint.

Since my birth the population of earth has almost doubled.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#188

Post by moozilla »

blharr wrote: post #87
jonas21 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However articles like this must link to references. There are links to sources for every piece of data in the article.

Where? One of the most crucial points "Training an AI model emits as much as 200 plane flights from New York to San Francisco" This seems to come from this blog https://icecat.com/blog/is-ai-truly-a-sustainable-choice/#:~... . which refers to this article https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06/06/239031/training-... which is talking about models like *GPT-2, BERT, and ELMo* -- _5+ year old models_ at this point. Th…

The link the article uses to source the 60 GWh claim (1) appears to be broken, but all of the other sources I found give similar numbers, for example (2) which gives 50 GWh. This is specifically to train GPT-4, GPT-3 was estimated to have taken 1,287 MWh in (3), so the 50 GWh number seems reasonable.

I couldn't find any great sources for the 200 plane flights number (and as you point out the article doesn't source this either), but I asked o1 to crunch the numbers (4) and it came up with a similar figure (50-300 flights depending on the size of the plane). I was curious if the numbers would be different if you considered emissions instead of directly converting jet fuel energy to watt hours, but the end result was basically the same.

[1] https://www.numenta.com/blog/2023/08/10/ai-is-harming-our-pl...

[2] https://www.ri.se/en/news/blog/generative-ai-does-not-run-on...

[3] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-hidden-cost-...

[4] https://chatgpt.com/share/678b6178-d0e4-800d-a12b-c319e324d2...

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#189

Post by palata »

> and it’s completely clear to me that one side is getting it entirely wrong and spreading misleading ideas

What a great way to start an article. I get it as: "I am not open to listening to your arguments, and in fact if you disagree with me, I will assume that you are a moron".

It reminds me of people saying "planes are not the problem: actually if you compare it to driving a car, it uses less energy per person and per km". Except that as soon as you take a passenger in your car, the car is better (why did you assume that the plane was full and the car almost empty?). And that you don't remotely drive as far with your car as you fly with a plane. Obviously planes are worse than cars. If you need to imagine people commuting by car to the other side of the continent to prove your point, maybe it's not valid?

The fact is that the footprint of IT is increasing every year. And quite obviously, LLMs use more energy than "traditional" searches. Any new technology that makes us use more energy is bad for environment.

Unless you don't understand how bad the situation is: we have largely missed the goal of keeping global warming to 1.5C (thinking that we could reach it is absurd at this point). To keep 2C, we need to reduce global emissions by 5% every year. That's a Covid crisis every year. Let's be honest, it probably won't happen. So we'll go higher than 2C, fine. At the other end of the spectrum, 4C means that a big stripe (where billions of people live) around the equator will become unlivable for human beings (similar to being on Mars: you need equipment just to survive outside). I guess I don't need to argue how bad that would be, and we are currently going there. ChatGPT is part of that effort, as a new technology that makes us increase our emissions instead of doing the opposite.

Re: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment

#190

Post by _ache_ »

jonas21 wrote: post #25
zdragnar wrote: post #3

The title does not match the content. A more appropriate title is "Emissions caused by chatgpt use are not significant in comparison to everything else." But, given that title, it becomes somewhat obvious that the article itself doesn't need to exist.

> given that title, it becomes somewhat obvious that the article itself doesn't need to exist. Why? I regularly hear people trying to argue that LLMs are an environmental distaster.

Because LLMs are an environmental disaster.

It's not about any individual usage. It's the global technology that is yet to prove to be useful and that already have bad for the environment.

Any new usage should be free of impact on the environment.

(Note: The technology of LLM itself is not an environmental disaster, but how it is put in use currently isn't the way).

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