When you do 0 AI prompts, they all cause the same amount of emissions, which is 0.

Not really, this is more like an obvious statement like "certain activities like sports may cause you to burn twice the calories. Yeah, doh.

Because it really doesn’t. For most tasks, it would require more human energy to do the work than an LLM, just because we are much slower at it than an AI. I mean, humans operate at around 80 W just by existing (basal metabolic rate).

If the AI is powered by renewables, it’s cleaner than humans. If it’s powered by fossil fuels, it’s likely much worse (though I haven’t run the calculations).

Now obviously, this presumes that the output of an AI is even valuable at all, which is often not the case.

Because its still bullshit.

Obviously. But I have no context on how much my actions create co2 in the first place. I assume driving a car generates a majority of it, or maybe heating the house, but I still don't have any clue how many kilograms that might be. But what I do know is how many kilowatts my house consumes electricity and at least roughly how much our appliances use, so if you want to try and blame me for consuming precious resources by generating text or watching a video at least give me an measurement I can easily comprehend.

Always remember to say please and thank you

Why not create comparison like "generating 1000 words of your fanfiction consumes as much energy as you do all day" or something more easily to compare.

Considering that you can generate 1000 words in a single prompt to ChatGPT, the energy to do that would be about 0.3Wh .

That's about as much energy as a typical desktop would use in about 8 seconds while browsing the fediverse (assuming a desktop consuming energy at a rate of ~150W).

Or, on the other end of the spectrum, if you're browsing the fediverse on Voyager with a smartphone consuming energy at a rate of 2W, then that would be about 9 minutes of browsing the fediverse (4.5 minutes if using a regular browser app in my case since it bumped up the energy usage to ~4W).

Recycling 2: Electric Bugaloo

Does this also apply to AI models I run locally on my computer?

That’s cool. Not my problem to solve.

just to set the record straight:

"For example, having DeepSeek R1 (70 billion parameters) answer 600,000 questions would create CO2 emissions equal to a round-trip flight from London to New York. Meanwhile, Qwen 2.5 (72 billion parameters) can answer more than three times as many questions (about 1.9 million) with similar accuracy rates while generating the same emissions."

i'd say that makes the average usage for personal reasons an non-issue.

That's a good question no one else seems to be asking. When you run local prompts, you're using more battery on your laptop or power from your PSU, but both of those are limited by their relatively small power consumption (when compared to server farms). Therefore, it could be likened to encoding heavy video or exporting complex blender models. Are you using more electricity? Yes. Is it city-eroding amounts more? Not even close.

And won't stop putting this slop in everything.

Sometimes i use ai to analyze spreadsheet data for me and spit out an excel sheet with the answers. It says "thinking" for like 10 mins, and i can just imagine some GPUs on fire in a datacenter somewhere...

Generally, heating and cooling are the main energy consumption for domestic purposes. next up is the car, and then electrical consumption. (from what i remember).

I suppose it depends on where you live. Our house consumes something over 20 000kWh per year as our heating is also electric (and rest of the consumption is pretty neglible compared to heating) and we also have a fireplace which consumes around 15m³ of firewood, depending on how cold winter happens to be. Electric grid here has a ton of renewables and nuclear, so co2 footprint should be on the smaller side compared to global average.

Also, as google and microsoft (among others) shoehorns AI "answers" to everything that adds up, but private use seems to be quite insignificant anyways.

FWIW, a short query to a typical sized LLM takes about 1Wh of energy, there lots of variance on how big the model you are using and how long the input and outputs are but thats the correct order of magnitude. 1Wh is the amount of energy consumed by a 1kW electric kettle in 3.6 seconds or a 2kW hairdryer in 1.8 seconds.

if you assume that energy was produced in a coal power plant (the worst for co2 emissions) then it makes around 0.3g of co2 emissions , which is the equivalent of burning about one droplet of gasoline.

I think most people have decided they like using AI more than they care about climate change

No they are magically free.

/s

Lemmy wants me to believe that AI is the danger for climate change. This is like drinking through paper straw while the pollution comes from mega-factories who dump their waste in the river.

So AI is the problem… huh… and not the thousands of missiles dropped in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and the Occupied Terrorist Zionazi Land.

Cool I guess, AI Bad!

Also true: When you do 0 AI prompts, they all cause the same amount of emissions, which is 999999999 gigajoules.