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A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

washingtonpost.com

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Re: A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

#61

Post by agentultra »

fhd2 wrote: post #26
luma wrote: post #22

I think the comparison that should be made here is the actual alternative - what is the cost in kw/hr of me sitting in front of my powered-on and not-sleeping laptop while I spend the next 10 minutes penning an email? If the machine can make that happen in a second, and it takes me 600x longer to do that while consuming power that entire time, I suspect that the AI carries an overall advantage when you actually inclu…

That seems to get a bit philosophical. Are you not gonna use your laptop ~8 hours a day thanks to generative AI? If you still do, that part is constant. Are you gonna get less done in those 8 hours? Probably. Is it good for the environment to get more done in less time? Can't really answer that one generically. We humans do a lot of stuff simply because we can. If unemployment goes up 20% from generative AI (just a m…

There’s an assumption here that Gen AI makes everyone more productive.

I find it’s quite the opposite for me. The time saved on generating a response is spent making sure there are no mistakes, misrepresentations, or plain BS. In code, it’s making sure it didn’t generate subtle security errors and the like. I find it’s better at wasting my time than anything.

And then having to read my GenAI-using colleagues’ “work.” What they could have explained themselves in a few minutes becomes a wall of text they didn’t bother to review, let alone write. Waste of time.

We ought to consider that this isn’t the revolutionary tool that’s going to replace workers. That’s capitalism talking and it has a problem on its hands: shareholders want profits for all the money they’ve dumped into these ventures and API tokens aren’t covering their costs right now. Of course they want us to believe it makes everyone instantly more productive since that would sell more API tokens.

… they’ll just deal with how to actually make money with this and hide or justify the environmental damage later.

Re: A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

#62

Post by fhd2 »

schiffern wrote: post #59
fhd2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to get a bit philosophical. Are you not gonna use your laptop ~8 hours a day thanks to generative AI? If you still do, that part is constant. Are you gonna get less done in those 8 hours? Probably. Is it good for the environment to get more done in less time? Can't really answer that one generically. We humans do a lot of stuff simply because we can. If unemployment goes up 20% from generative AI (just a m…

>Of course another way to see all this is to argue that we need 20% less humans now, so we save any environmental costs those people induce. Seems a bit gruesome to me. Seems a bit of a straw man to me. Perhaps there's some light between ecosystem literacy ("carrying capacity is real") and mass murder? :-\ A third way (which differs only in timing) is thinking we can support 100% of the people who exist right now, bu…

Yes, sorry, that was a strawman, didn't quite realise it. On that point, I _do_ believe that there are too many humans. I'm certainly not in favour of taking any drastic measures against that, but in the long run, I think we'd all be better off if there was less of us. Seems like we have a dynamic right now that will see to that over time: demographic transition.

But my main point - which I didn't make very eloquently - is that we humans do have a tendency to keep ourselves busy no matter what, sometimes doing things that are objectively pointless, sometimes doing things to the detriment of our species. I think the majority of what I've spent my life building falls into one of those two categories, unfortunately. Most applications of generative AI I've seen certainly do. And even if we do things that are objectively beneficial, we still spend resources doing so.

I think it's cool that there's research into the magnitude of that. If you want to save money, you start by understanding what you spend your money on, to use an analogy here.

Re: A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

#63

Post by Ukv »

According to the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271), the vast majority of water usage is not from cooling but indirectly from energy usage. The paper in turn gets its electricity water intensity from: https://www.wsp.com/-/media/insights/us/documents/wp_guidanc... (reference [20]) - which notes:

> Even though hydropower water withdrawal and consumption intensities are usually orders of magnitude larger than other types and likely to skew overall regional averages, it is important to include hydropower in the factors to show not only the power sector’s dependency on water but also its vulnerability to water shortages.

Some people have pointed out that using water for cooling does not destroy it - it'll all rain back down. I think it would've still been fair to consider how much processed/drinking water was being evaporated, since it'd need processing again, but I can't really see the justification for the article's framing when the figure is measuring water that would've just flowed into the sea had the hydroelectric dam not been there.

Re: A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

#64

Post by rickydroll »

agentultra wrote: post #61
fhd2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to get a bit philosophical. Are you not gonna use your laptop ~8 hours a day thanks to generative AI? If you still do, that part is constant. Are you gonna get less done in those 8 hours? Probably. Is it good for the environment to get more done in less time? Can't really answer that one generically. We humans do a lot of stuff simply because we can. If unemployment goes up 20% from generative AI (just a m…

There’s an assumption here that Gen AI makes everyone more productive. I find it’s quite the opposite for me. The time saved on generating a response is spent making sure there are no mistakes, misrepresentations, or plain BS. In code, it’s making sure it didn’t generate subtle security errors and the like. I find it’s better at wasting my time than anything. And then having to read my GenAI-using colleagues’ “work.”…

All of your complaints about generative AI will be fixed with more engineering. I suggest comparing the state of generative AI to the state of automobiles, radios, and rockets now versus a decade after they hit the public consciousness. Even centuries-old civil engineering has its generative AI failure moments like Tacoma Narrows.

All of these fields and many more solve their problems through engineering. The same is true for AI, and the pressure put on them for energy/water consumption will drive that engineering.

Re: A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

#65

Post by n_ary »

While using water is one interesting point of the actual paper(from which this article is written), I would say, to a lay person, water volume makes more sense than arbitrary values like KiloJoules or KiloWatts, because I can imagine what a 20mL water would look like, but can't imagine what 20mJ or 20mW looks like.

Re: A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

#66

Post by juancn »

Why water? It's not lost, it's endlessly renewable, specially since it's mostly just evaporated.

Energy or carbon released is much more interesting.

Do they mean evaporated?

That's 2.45 kJ per gram starting at 20C or 1.2MJ per half liter water bottle or around, roughly 340 Wh per email.

So, at an average price of let's say, a dollar per kWh, that's 34 cents of energy spent on the response.

Something is off in the cost (unless I messed up in the math which is likely).

Re: A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

#67

Post by aubanel »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #54
Panzer04 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1kj is nothing. That's 0.3wh, or 0.0003kwh.

That's for a single inference though. You can do about 3600 of them in an hour.

Yes but the article's setting is precisely about 1 email so 1 inference, and their number is 0.14kWh, which is way off.

Re: A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

#68

Post by InsanityCheck »

This makes no sense. 100 words for 0.14kWh is crazy.

Currently the api costs 15$ for 1M output tokens ~ 750k words. So 50k words/$

But, according to washingtonpost, 50k words consume 70kWh of electricity.

Which in turn would imply that OpenAI needs to pay less than 1.4ct per kWh of electricity to make a profit. Average industrial electricity cost in US ~8ct/kwh.

-> The numbers are wrong or OpenAI has solved AGI and is using a fission reactor to produce energy.

Also the numbers in the paper don't fit the numbers in the article (paper is older though). I actually think this is grossly misleading at best, and malicious misinformation at worst.

Re: A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots

#69

Post by archerx »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #56
archerx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in the tropics where it was hotter than the USA and we survived just fine without A/C. A/C is luxury and your luxury is destroying the planet. I don’t want you to stop using A/C but I would like people to accept that it is a luxury that is not needed in most cases.

There's times and places where you can't survive "just fine" without AC. And the number of those times and places is increasing.

Funny most of the world lives just fine without A/C. It really is an American thing.
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