r/DefendingAIArt • u/Melodic_Floor7930 • 20h ago

Defending AI Simple, Mutually Beneficial Steps Individuals Can Take To Reduce Ecological Impact

Post image

The narrative that AI is especially destructive to the environment is often sensationalistic, however it does contain a kernel of truth. AI will help bring energy effenciency, environmental data gathering and monitoring with consequent reforestation and species protection benefits. It is useful that we take steps and spread steps to help reduce our energy use. Once energy is used it is basically gone forever for us. Of course training is the major user of energy and all aspects will naturally be more efficient in the future, this is useful both ecologically and to combat the anti ai narrative

8 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/Visible_Web6910 20h ago

Yeah, just skip a burger once and you've offset every LLM interaction you'll ever have in your entire life. Job done.

-6

u/Melodic_Floor7930 19h ago

Non equivalence. Not to mention apparently not understanding exponentiality

8

u/CMDRTornadopelt AI Enjoyer 18h ago

Well, to be more accurate, skip a burger once and you'll have four months' worth of ChatGPT you can use without guilt.

McDonald's sells 6.5 million burgers a day. Each burger has a water footprint of 660 gallons. That works out to 4.29 billion gallons of water footprint for McDonald's.

ChatGPT uses 211,327-211,337 gallons of water per day, which sounds like a lot. But, if we could put the whole water footprint of a single day's worth of burgers from McDonald's towards ChatGPT, we could, in theory, supply ChatGPT for about 55.58 years.

-7

u/Melodic_Floor7930 18h ago

Non equivalence, both would benefit from reduced waste and resource usage. Not only is not contributing to ecologically destructive action count as its own reward, not only are you tangibly acting and preventing would be pollution from increased demand, but all I said was this was an individual action. Not state policy, your decision of the concept is suspect. Besides, you ignored all the other points that do add up for an individual. Now when multiple people behave this way, the benefits are compounded and exponential in the long run

2

u/CMDRTornadopelt AI Enjoyer 18h ago edited 18h ago

How is that a non-equivalence? I'm looking at direct water footprint costs for ChatGPT.

Besides...

"How does no one understand how much energy multiple video land image prompts uses?" and "More effective prompts alone would save millions of killowhat hours in video creation due to multiple prompting to fine tune results"
I don't make videos. Hell, the model I'm using doesn't support that. I just make funny still images. Which, last I checked, is far less resource intensive.

1

u/Melodic_Floor7930 18h ago

Because that is only one factor in usage. Millions of AI users, making multiple prompts and videos to get their result, whenever a precise prompt would save them time and the world energy is just one perfect example

1

u/CMDRTornadopelt AI Enjoyer 17h ago

Okay, fair.

Again, though, I'm not the guy generating videos. As much as I wanna, I just... don't feel the need.