‘Just an unbelievable amount of pollution’: how big a threat is AI to the climate?

AI is exacerbating the damage we are causing by staying on fossil fuels. I see the issue is mainly political as we have green energy and all

“This idea that the lower cost of renewables alone will drive decarbonisation – it’s not enough,” said Daly. “Because if there’s a huge source of energy demand that wants to grow, it will land on these stranded fossil fuel assets.”

Corporations don't think in savings, they think in budgets. If the cost of electricity goes down, thanks to e.g. renewables being cheaper, that just means that they can afford to use more electricity.

Unpopular opinion of the day: LLMs are a distraction from the climate fight.

Using chatbots emits the same tiny amounts of CO2 as other normal things we do online, and way less than most offline things we do. Even when you include “hidden costs” like training, the emissions from making hardware, energy used in cooling, and AI chips idling between prompts, the carbon cost of an average chatbot prompt adds up to less than 1/150,000th of the average American’s daily emissions. Water is similar. Everything we do uses a lot of water. Most electricity is generated using water, and most of the way AI “uses” water is actually just in generating its electricity. The average American’s daily water footprint is ~800,000 times as much as the full cost of an AI prompt. The actual amount of water used per prompt in data centers themselves is vanishingly small.

Because chatbot prompts use so little energy and water, if you’re sitting and reading the full responses they generate, it’s very likely that you’re using way less energy and water than you otherwise would in your daily life. It takes ~1000 prompts to raise your emissions by 1%. If you sat at your computer all day, sending and reading 1000 prompts in a row, you wouldn’t be doing more energy intensive things like driving, or using physical objects you own that wear out, need to be replaced, and cost emissions and water to make. Every second you spend walking outside wears out your sneakers just a little bit, to the point that they eventually need to be replaced. Sneakers cost water to make. My best guess is that every second of walking uses as much water in expectation as ~7 chatbot prompts. So sitting inside at your computer saves that water too. It seems like it’s near impossible to raise your personal emissions and water footprint at all using chatbots, because using all day on something that ends up causing 1% of your normal emissions is exactly like spending all day on an activity that costs only 1% of the money you normally spend.

There are no other situations, anywhere, where we worry about amounts of energy and water this small. I can’t find any other places where people have gotten worried about things they do that use such tiny amounts of energy. Chatbot energy and water use being a problem is a really bizarre meme that has taken hold, I think mostly because people are surprised that chatbots are being used by so many people that on net their total energy and water use is noticeable. Being “mindful” with your chatbot usage is kind of like filling a large pot of water to boil to make food, and before boiling it, taking a pipet and removing tiny drops of the water from the pot at a time to “only use the water you need” or stopping your shower a tenth of a second early for the sake of the climate. You do not need to be “mindful” with your chatbot usage for the same reason you don’t need to be “mindful” about those additional droplets of water you boil.

Shew, what a headline. Keep in mind that AI is not just all LLM. I’m not sure how much more juice we can squeeze out of LLMs, but we’re just scratching the surface with other prediction models.

The ability to have smart cars that improve fuel efficiency by adjusting to traffic conditions may very well compensate for the increased electricity demand created by data centers.

New chemistry models may finally help us produce batteries that can meet the demands of a renewable energy grid.

We’re standing at a precipice. What we’re doing as a society is not working today - it’s not sustainable. And I’m not shy to say that I’m one of the few here on ActivityPub that think we may be able to leverage AI to dig us out of this hole we’ve started to dig ourselves in. But, in order to do that, we need clear heads, with clear goals and the incentives to encourage others to execute on them.

What we’re doing right now, just complaining about what’s not working isn’t going to save us.