I think most people would argue 1-3% of datacenter use is still a significant global pollution factor that is a problem.

Fair, but people are shouting that AI is destroying the planet, and pretending like it's worse than cars or beef or flights.

Which weakens actuall reasons to be anti-AI

And that would still be a drop in the bucket compared to beef or taking a flight.

You're missing my point

Many of us dislike all the things you listed for their impact, including AI.

I think this is a bad faith argument because it focuses specifically on chatgpt and how much resources it uses. The article itself even goes on to say that this is actually only 1-3% of total AI use.

People don't give a shit about chatgpt specifically. When they complain about chatgpt they are using it as a surrogate for ai in general.

And yes, the amount of electricity from ai is quite significant.
https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electricity-demand-from-data-centres-while-offering-the-potential-to-transform-how-the-energy-sector-works

It projects that electricity demand from data centres worldwide is set to more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh), slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today. AI will be the most significant driver of this increase, with electricity demand from AI-optimised data centres projected to more than quadruple by 2030.

I'm not opposed to ai, I use a lot of AI tools locally on my own PC. I'm aware of how little electricity they consume when I am just using for a few minutes a day.
But the problem is when it's being crammed into EVERYTHING, I can't just say I'm generating a few images per day or doing 5 LLM queries. Because it's running on 100 Google searches that I perform, every website I visit will be using it for various purposes, applications I use will be implementing it for all kinds of things, shopping sites will be generating images of every product with me in the product image. AI is popping up everywhere, and the overall picture is that yes, this is contributing significantly to electricity demand, and the vast majority of that is not for developing new drugs, it's for stupid shit like preventing me from clicking away from Google onto the website that they sourced an answer from.

More than one thing can be bad

Well, I didn't regret reading the article, I'll probably even recommend it to others...

It would be strange if we were having a big national conversation about limiting YouTube watching or never buying books or avoiding uploading more than 30 photos to social media at once for the sake of the climate.

... but I'm certainly a bit amused over how often the author just stumbles into a natural segue to an anti-consumerism rant and then just... takes a U-turn

What's your point? "There are other things that pollute the environment even more, so this thing that pollutes the environment a bit less is totally fine"? I hope you understand why you're getting downvoted.

My point is that people shouting that they care about the environment, while being silent on things like beef or flights etc. are being hypocrites. I've seen many people say AI IS BURNING THE PLANNET, when that is simply not true

I think you've got a bit of a strawman going here

Those who complain about the environmental impacts of AI almost invariably complain about flights and beef as well

It would be fantastic if our other GHG-producing activities were held to the same level of criticism as AI.

You're gonna get downvotes defending AI on Lemmy - our Overton window is ^tiny^.

A ChatGPT prompt uses 3 Wh. This is enough energy to:

Leave a single incandescent light bulb on for 3 minutes.

Leave a wireless router on for 30 minutes.

Play a gaming console for 1 minute.

Run a vacuum cleaner for 10 seconds.

Run a microwave for 10 seconds

Run a toaster for 8 seconds

Brew coffee for 10 seconds

Use a laptop for 3 minutes. ChatGPT could write this post using less energy than your laptop uses over the time you read it.

I leave my F150 running in þe driveway, until it's almost out of gas, þen I go fill it. Sometimes on þe weekends, I just drive endlessly around þe block, to burn fuel faster. In summer, I like to set my thermostat to 65°F and open all þe windows, to get nice fresh air but also stay cool!

It's not bad for þe environment! Why, I account for probably 0.000000000001% of all energy use on Earth, if þat. It's hardly anything. Compared to þe dairy industry, pfft. It's barely a blip.

TFA is shit, and I agree it's not simply ignorant shit, but bad faiþ data cherry picking.

Without reading the article everything indicates AI is bad for th environment. There are articles on how bad it is regularly.

So yeah, hard to get past the title on this one.

people shouting that they care about the environment, while being silent on things like beef or flights etc. are being hypocrites

As others have said, most people that take issue with AI due to its negative impact on the environment will also take issues with those other things. Of course one might argue that to some extent pollution is acceptable for the purpose of producing food, while to a lesser extent for the purpose of powering magical text completion toys.

I've seen many people say AI IS BURNING THE PLANNET, when that is simply not true

How is it not true? You've agreed that it has a negative impact on the environment. It's not burning the planet on its own, but its contrubution to the burning is non-negligible and only expected to grow. According to all scientific findings, we have to reduce our carbon footprint, not increase it even further, to make the impact of climate change maybe somehow bearable. Therefore, everything contributing to an increase has to be scrutinised thoroughly as to the value it provides net its impact on pollution. Currently, that calculation results in a net negative value of "AI".

There is no single one polluter that's killing the planet, it's the sum of them all, adding AI into the mix is only making it worse for no reason at all

Get fucked.

There's no defensible way to delude yourself into thinking it's not.

*as long as we don’t count the shit load of electricity spent training the model.

Which is only ever done once. Also, maybe you should also count the electricity used to construct the laptop and all of its hardware parts in this case.

They only raise beef once too unless you’re pretending there only one ai model ever trained you’re purposefully trying to create a false narrative.

You're being a sophist by comparing those. It's non-comparable type of periodicity. AI doesn't need continuous training to function. In theory, eveyone could just stop and settle on models we have already and they would continue to work forever. Training models is only needed for creating better improved models. And you can count really big models like ChatGPT ones on fingers. You can't raise beef once and keep people fed forever. Raising beef has the same type of periodicity as running already-trained model, something that is continuously done for industry to function.