99% of users don’t care. Also, an anecdote: We had a conference at the Academy of Sciences of Hamburg and a guy held a presentation on this after a bunch of talks about using LLMs in research and he was very close to being booed, literally nobody in the room wanted to hear that and they ripped him a new one (conversationally) during Q&A. So, if generally green-leaning academics from Germany don’t even care, imagine the average user.
mucklaenthusiast on
Why is there not a comparison to a Google search?
I feel like that would be more useful.
And I don’t even think energy usage is the issue, becuase, e.g., you compare it to using a microwave.
But a microwave does something for me, it heats my food. That’s useful energy.
AI doesn’t do anything useful that a Google search couldn’t.
I’ll also say: This is strictly speaking about text, which I can totally see at not being very inefficient. In a perfect world, I can even imagine it being more efficient than using Google (or other search engines), because if you can get, with one question to AI, what you can get from 10 Google queries, then obviously the AI is actuallly better for the environment.
However, I see so may people use AI to e.g. colour images, create videos (like the newly revealed Meta thing that is just an endless stream of AI videos) or create racist memes to support their talking point, that I don’t really feel this is even an honest discussion.
If AI was just a more efficient search engine, I don’t think many people would have a problem with it.
And that’s not even talking about how people’s brains may atrophy when relying too much on AI.
2 Comments
99% of users don’t care. Also, an anecdote: We had a conference at the Academy of Sciences of Hamburg and a guy held a presentation on this after a bunch of talks about using LLMs in research and he was very close to being booed, literally nobody in the room wanted to hear that and they ripped him a new one (conversationally) during Q&A. So, if generally green-leaning academics from Germany don’t even care, imagine the average user.
Why is there not a comparison to a Google search?
I feel like that would be more useful.
And I don’t even think energy usage is the issue, becuase, e.g., you compare it to using a microwave.
But a microwave does something for me, it heats my food. That’s useful energy.
AI doesn’t do anything useful that a Google search couldn’t.
I’ll also say: This is strictly speaking about text, which I can totally see at not being very inefficient. In a perfect world, I can even imagine it being more efficient than using Google (or other search engines), because if you can get, with one question to AI, what you can get from 10 Google queries, then obviously the AI is actuallly better for the environment.
However, I see so may people use AI to e.g. colour images, create videos (like the newly revealed Meta thing that is just an endless stream of AI videos) or create racist memes to support their talking point, that I don’t really feel this is even an honest discussion.
If AI was just a more efficient search engine, I don’t think many people would have a problem with it.
And that’s not even talking about how people’s brains may atrophy when relying too much on AI.