My thoughts and favorite points of someone else’s writing from the web:
A cheat sheet for why using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment
By: Andy Masley
Honestly reading this article made me feel better. Someone recently made this very point to me (that AI is bad for the environment) and I didn’t really have a response. I guess I believed them because I had never really considered it and the stories of bitcoin mining using more energy than some countries came to mind. Turns out, that (the AI thing not the bitcoin thing) is total bogus. When’s the last time you thought to yourself that you should reduce your googling to save the planet?
ElectricitySection titled: Electricity
One ChatGPT search uses is enough energy to:
- Leave a wireless router on for 3 minutes
- Play a gaming console for 6 seconds
- Run a vacuum cleaner for 1 second
- Run a microwave for 1 second
If I choose not to take a flight to Europe, I save 30,500,000 ChatGPT searches. this is like stopping more than 70 people from searching ChatGPT for their entire lives. Preventing ChatGPT searches is a hopelessly useless lever for the climate movement to try to pull. We have so many tools at our disposal to make the climate better. Why make everyone feel guilt over something that won’t have any impact?
ChatGPT is bad relative to other things we do (it’s ten times as bad as a Google search)Section titled: ChatGPT is bad relative to other things we do (it’s ten times as bad as a Google search)
A digital clock uses one million times more power (1W) than an analog watch (1µW). “Using a digital clock instead of a watch is one million times as harmful to the climate” is correct, but misleading. The energy digital clocks use rounds to zero compared to travel, food, and heat and air conditioning. Climate guilt about digital clocks would be misplaced.
The relationship between Google and ChatGPT is similar to watches and clocks. One uses more energy than the other, but both round to zero.
WaterSection titled: Water
If you want to prompt ChatGPT 40 times, you can just stop your shower 0.1 seconds early.
Each ChatGPT prompt uses between 1-2.5 mL of water if you include the water cost of training, the water cost of generating the electricity used, and the water used by the data center to cool the equipment.
This means that every single day, the average American uses enough water for 240,000-610,000 ChatGPT prompts.
Chatbots are < 3% of AI energy usageSection titled: Chatbots are < 3% of AI energy usage
If we convinced every one of the 400,000,000 people who are using ChatGPT every day people to stop using it forever (along with Gemini, Claude, Grok, and other chatbots), AI energy and water use would still be 97-99% of its current value.
The services using 97-99% of AI’s energy budget are (roughly in order)
- Recommender Systems - video streaming and social media feeds
- Enterprise Analytics & Predictive AI - data analytics and forecasting
- Search & Ad Targeting - search engines and digital ads
- Computer vision - image and video analysis
- Voice and Audio AI - processing spoken language or audio signals