In the late 2000s there was a push by a lot of businesses to not print emails and people use to add a 'Please consider this environment before printing this email.'
Considering how bad LLMs/'ai' are with power consumption and water usage a new useless tag email footer should be made.
Ooooh, I'm totally adding that to my email signature.
Aaaaaaand done.
If you don't mind the additional real estate, it would also be great to have a version where "printing" is still there but struck out, for people who aren't aware of the original.
Had to shrink the font a bit; looks better all on one line.
🏞 Please consider the environment before issuing a return-to-office mandate
This is the right response - RTO is much worse for the climate than GenAI.
This! There are no reason go back to office for some professions like programmers, managers, etc
I don't think regular people really understand the power needed for AI. It's often taught that we just have it. But not where it comes from.
True, but most people don't realise how little not printing an email 'helped' the environment.
I don't think regular people really understand how little 3W per request is. It's the energy you take up by eating 3kcal. Or what your WiFi router uses in half an hour. Or your clothes dryer in 5 seconds.
People keep telling us that ai energy use is very low, but at the same time, companies keep building more and more giant power hungry datacenters. Something simply doesn't add up.
Sure, a small local model can generate text at low power usage, but how useful will that text be, and how many people will actually use it? What I see is people constantly moving to the newest, greatest model, and using it for more and more things, processing more and more tokens. Always more and more.
Each datacenter is set to handle millions of users, so it concentrates all the little requests into very few physical locations.
The tech industry further amplifies things with ambient LLM invocation. You do a random google search, it implicitly does an LLM unasked. When a user is using an LLM enabled code editor, it's making LLM requests every few seconds of typing to drive the autocomplete suggestions. Often it has to submit a new LLM request before the old one even completed because the user typed more while the LLM was chewing on the previous input.
So each LLM invocation may be reasonable, but they are being concentrated impact wise into very few places and invocations are amplified by tech industry being overly aggressive about overuse for the sake of 'ambient magic.
I wonder how the power usage of running an LLM locally compares to playing a modern game at high settings. Can they be very different?
Text generation uses hardly any energy at all, though. Most phones do it locally these days. In fact, it likely takes less energy to generate an email in 5 seconds than it would take for you to type it out manually in 5 minutes with the screen on the whole time.
I want to see the "cease and desist you may not use my facebook posts without my express permission" type footers but against AI to start showing up
Please consider the environment before sending me an email, seriously, I won't read it.
“If everyone is littering, it’s not a big deal if I throw the occasional can on the ground”
I miss the days where climate activists didn't get distracted by small change like GenAI. The big ticket issues haven't changed since the beginning of the climate movement: Cars, Flights, Industry (mainly concrete), Meat and Heating/AC are what drives climate change - any movement that polices individual usage of negligible CO2 emission will fail because noone likes to be preached at.
I mean, depends on the email. If you spend more time answering yourself than the AI would, you almost certainly emit more green house gasses, used more fresh water and electricity, and burned more calories. Depending on the email, you might have also decreased net happiness generally.
Do we care about the environment or not? Please, oppose datacenters in desserts and stop farming alfalfa where water supplies are low. But your friend using AI to answer an email that could have been a google search is not the problem.
To be fair they never cared about environment. A paper is something easy to recycle and certainly not the most polluting material to produce.
It was more about saving money, greenwashing and pushing a conversion towards digital archiving (which is much more efficient that paper)
This is the main reason I am reticent about using ai. I can get around its funtional limitations but I need to know they have brought the energy usage down.
It's not that bad when it's just you fucking around having it write fanfics instead of doing something more taxing, like playing an AAA video game or, idk, run a microwave or whatever it is normies do. Training a model is very taxing, but running them isn't and the opportunity cost might even be net positive if you tend to use your gpu a lot.
It becomes more of a problem when everyone is doing it when it's not needed, like reading and writing emails. There's no net positive, it's a very large scale usage, and brains are a hell of a lot more efficient at it. This use case has gotta be one of the dumbest imaginable, all while making people legitimately dumber using it over time.
You can run one on your PC locally so you know how much power it is consuming
It's the same as playing a 3d game. It's a GPU or GPU equivalent doing the work. It doesn't matter if you are asking it to summarize an email or play Red Dead Redemption.
I mean if every web search I do is like playing a 3d game then I will stick with web searches. 3d gaming is the most energy intensive thing I do on a computer.
How much further down than 3W/request can you go? i hope you don't let your microwave run 10 seconds longer than optimal, because that's exactly the amount of energy we are talking about. Or running a 5W nightlight for a bit over half an hour.
LLM and Image generation are not what kills the climate. What does are flights, cars, meat, and bad insulation of houses leading to high energy usage in winter. Even if we turned off all GenAI, it wouldn't even leave a dent compared to those behemoths.
Where is this 3W from? W isn't even an energy unit, but a power unit.
sorry, it should be 3 Wh, you are correct of course. The 3Wh come from here:
Every source here stays below 3Wh, so it's reasonable to use 3Wh as an upper bound. (I wouldn't trust Altmans 0,3 Wh tho lol)
Thanks for linking the sources. I will take a look into that
But it's everywhere now and it's almost impossible to use mainstream services without it being used. I can just go to Google anymore, type a search query and get a reply without AI bs being used. How long before it's baked into the GMail compose window and it doesn't without me wanting to.
Then we stop using it.
I think we need a Rule 34 of open-source programs:
Rule 34: If it exists, there is an open-source version of it
i) If no open-source version exists, it is currently being created
ii) If no open-source version is being created, you must create it yourself
I don't know if it would help, but you could also add links to articles about this. You could put hyperlinks behind numbers - like "[see 1, 2, 3, 4...]".
Here are some if you want to do this: https://www.wired.com/story/new-research-energy-electricity-artificial-intelligence-ai/
https://web.archive.org/web/20240318115424/https://disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-a-data-center-boom/
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-is-revitalizing-the-fossil-fuels
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-ai-power-home-appliances/
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-center-gas-emissions-tech
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/23/arizona-data-centers-navajo-power-aps-srp/
Na, that's too useful the point is to be virtue signalling
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.