The Hidden Environmental Impact of AI
jacobin.com
While the mass adoption of AI has transformed digital life seemingly overnight, regulators have fallen asleep on the job in curtailing AI data centers’ drain on energy and water resources.
  • Virkkunen@fedia.io
    1823·
    6 个月前

    Don’t worry folks, if we all stop using plastic straws and take 30 second showers, we’ll be able to offset 5% of the carbon emissions this AI has!

    • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      429·
      6 个月前

      Google ghg emissions in 2023 are 14.3 million metric tons. Which are a ridiculous percentage of global emissions.

      Commercial aviation emissions are 935.000 million metric tons by year.

      So IDK about plastic straws or google. But really if people stopped flying around so much that would actually make a dent on global emissions.

      Don’t get me wrong, google is a piece of shit. But they are not the ones causing climate change, neither is AI technology. Planes, cars, meat industry, offshore production… Those are some of the truly big culprits.

      • masquenox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        374·
        6 个月前

        But they are not the ones causing climate change

        The owners of google are capitalists. They are as responsible for climate change as any other capitalist.

        • NewNewAccount@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1514·
          6 个月前

          Capitalists serve customers and do not operate in a vacuum. This finger pointing does nothing productive.

          • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.caEnglish
            27·
            6 个月前

            Capitalists have captured regulation and to a large extent democracy in the US. So finger pointing towards them is entirely useful. Especially given they spend good money to point the finger at us.

          • masquenox@lemmy.worldEnglish
            102·
            6 个月前

            Capitalists serve customers hoard wealth through reckless profiteering irregardless of the costs to the rest of human society and do not operate in a vacuum.

            FTFY. I do agree with your last part, though. The political racketeer establishments that enable them and the fascist security institutions that protect them are equally as culpable as they are.

          • umbrella@lemmy.mlEnglish
            3·
            6 个月前

            well pay me for the tickets and i will gladly do more international flights everywhere.

      • sunzu@kbin.run
        22·
        6 个月前

        Bro… Most peoples “personalities” revolves around “travel”

        Telling them to stop brain dead tourism will not accept! Fuck your climate

        • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          4·
          6 个月前

          You do you. But other people may have other priorities.

          Anyway, how many times have an user to use an AI to even come close to a single commercial plate through the Atlantic? It may be a freaking lot.

          You giving away AI, or even forcing all humandkind to do so, might as well do nothing as far as climate change is concerned.

          • Ibuthyr@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            2·
            6 个月前

            I still believe there are other priorities over one trip every couple of years. Flight is one of the greatest achievements of humanity and I firmly believe it is important to visit other cultures.

            • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              21·
              6 个月前

              I’m not sure about that. I live in a country that is suffering a lot because of tourism. And I’m not very fond of it.

              Sometimes I prefer that people would just read our Wikipedia page instead of coming here.

              • Ibuthyr@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
                11·
                6 个月前

                I gather from your comments that you live in Spain, right? You guys suffer from all the 20€ flights going there from other European countries. At those prices you’ll mostly encounter human trash (I know this because I’m from Germany and the the majority of Germans visiting Spain are morons), so I feel with you. These cheap flights need to stop. I’d like to see the kerosene taxed fully for European flights. Have the prices be something to think about.

            • markon@lemmy.worldEnglish
              11·
              6 个月前

              It’s great if you can afford it. If you can afford to fly even a couple times a year you’re pretty privileged. I can’t, and I’m still privileged.

              • Ibuthyr@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
                1·
                6 个月前

                I can’t either. My wife is a teacher and we have a child. We can’t vacation in the off-seasons. We both have great jobs. So if we get to fly, it’s something special. And I don’t want that taken away to be honest. Using airplanes like taxis however (e.g. Ryan Air)? That’s just not a good thing to do to the environment.

    • nialv7@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 个月前

      Sounds like not using Google search would be a way more effective way of reducing CO2

  • mctoasterson@reddthat.comEnglish
    79·
    6 个月前

    The annoying part is how many mainstream tech companies have ham-fisted AI into every crevice of every product. It isn’t necessary and I’m not convinced it results in a “better search result” for 90% of the crap people throw into Google. Basic indexed searches are fine for most use cases.

    • AlecSadler@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      16·
      6 个月前

      As a buzzword or whatever this is leagues worse than “agile”, which I already loathed the overuse/integration of.

      • xthexder@l.sw0.comEnglish
        7·
        6 个月前

        Before AI it was IoT. Nobody asked for an Internet connected toaster or fridge…

        • Balder@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          6 个月前

          I always felt like I was alone in this thinking. I think anyone with a bit of a security mindset don’t want everything connected, besides it makes them more expensive and easier to break. It’s certainly very convenient for programmed obsolescence.

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            6 个月前

            It definitely has to walk in the desert for a while. I know multiple people who like it for some stuff. Like cameras and managing air conditioning.

    • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      511·
      6 个月前

      Yes, but now we can get much worse results and three pages of ads for ten times the energy cost. Capitalism at its finest.

    • stebo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      162·
      6 个月前

      With adblock enabled I feel like their results are often better than for example Duckduckgo. I recently switched to using DDG as my standard search engine but I regularly find myself using Google instead to get the results I’m looking for.

      • Ledivin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        92·
        6 个月前

        Interesting, I’m actually the exact opposite. I always start with Google, because it’s usually good enough, but whenever it takes 2-3 tries to get something relevant, I switch to ddg and get it first try.

        • stebo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          101·
          6 个月前

          My issue is mostly with image search results. DDG’s images tend to be less relevant than Google’s. DDG also lacks “smart” results (idk the official term).

          For example when you search “rng 25” on Google, it will immediately present you with a random number between 1 and 25. On DDG you have to click on one of the search results and then use some website to generate the number.

          Or when searching for the results of a soccer game, Google will immediately present all the stats to you, while on DDG you will only find some articles about it.

          Of course it really depends on the kind of search and I’m sure DDG will regularly have better results than Google too.

          • Verat@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            4·
            6 个月前

            One example I had with DDG image search was transparent electronics, I couldnt find a way to get electronics with a transparent case, DDG would only give me generic electronics images that had transparency. Google got it though

          • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            3·
            6 个月前

            Those kinds of things are what people often take issue with Google about. Well, the second one anyway. The first is arguably not a search and is instead a calculation, but I admit that’s a little semantical.

            The first however, is Google taking information provided by third parties, and presenting it to the user. It prevents traffic from flowing through to the original site, and is something actively complained about.

            • stebo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              1·
              6 个月前

              And I should care about that because? Google is sparing me from visiting a website that will harass me to accept cookies, complain about my adblocker, probably request to send notifications, etc.

              • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                2·
                6 个月前

                The same reason we don’t let companies sell photocopies of books? This isn’t a take on piracy, to be clear. This is a take on one company stealing content from another, and serving it up as if it were their own. And when Google has a monopoly on search, that fucks over everyone but Google, including you.

                • stebo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                  2·
                  6 个月前

                  Extracting information from the internet that is freely available isn’t exactly stealing content. Haven’t you ever copied something from Wikipedia? Why would Wikipedia even exist if people can’t use and share its content?

  • lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    6117·
    6 个月前

    AI is just what crypto bros moved onto after people realized that was a scam. It’s immature technology that uses absurd amounts of energy for a solution in search of a problem, being pushed as the future, all for the prospect of making more money. Except this time it’s being backed by major corporations because it means fewer employees they have to pay.

    • pycorax@lemmy.worldEnglish
      144·
      6 个月前

      There are legitimate uses of AI in certain fields like medical research and 3D reconstruction that aren’t just a scam. However, most of these are not consumer facing and the average person won’t really hear about them.

      It’s unfortunate that what you said is very true on the consumer side of things…

      • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        3·
        6 个月前

        I would love to see an AI make an ANSYS model that isn’t shit. They might be able to make cute pictures, but when it comes to making models for CFD or FEA, AI is a complete waste of time.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      6 个月前

      energy for a solution in search of a problem,

      Except this time it’s being backed by major corporations because it means fewer employees they have to pay.

      Ah yes the classic it is useless and here is a use for it logic.

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12·
          6 个月前

          I have and don’t see the relevance. The argument is that it is useless and then mentions a use case. If you want to say it’s crap I won’t argue the point but you can’t say X and ~X.

  • ben@lemmy.zipEnglish
    43·
    6 个月前

    I skimmed the article, but it seems to be assuming that Google’s LLM is using the same architecture as everyone else. I’m pretty sure Google uses their TPU chips instead of a regular GPU like everyone else. Those are generally pretty energy efficient.

    That and they don’t seem to be considering how much data is just being cached for questions that are the same. And a lot of Google searches are going to be identical just because of the search suggestions funneling people into the same form of a question.

    • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      171·
      6 个月前

      Exactly. The difference between a cached response and a live one even for non-AI queries is an OOM difference.

      At this point, a lot of people just care about the ‘feel’ of anti-AI articles even if the substance is BS though.

      And then people just feed whatever gets clicks and shares.

    • AlecSadler@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      12·
      6 个月前

      I hadn’t really heard of the TPU chips until a couple weeks ago when my boss told me about how he uses USB versions for at-home ML processing of his closed network camera feeds. At first I thought he was using NVIDIA GPUs in some sort of desktop unit and just burning energy…but I looked the USB things up and they’re wildly efficient and he says they work just fine for his applications. I was impressed.

      • ben@lemmy.zipEnglish
        8·
        6 个月前

        Yeah they’re pretty impressive for some at home stuff and they’re not even that costly.

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        8·
        6 个月前

        The Coral is fantastic for use cases that don’t need large models. Object recognition for security cameras (using Blue Iris or Frigate) is a common use case, but you can also do things like object tracking (track where individual objects move in a video), pose estimation, keyphrase detection, sound classification, and more.

        It runs Tensorflow Lite, so you can also build your own models.

        Pretty good for a $25 device!

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
      6·
      6 个月前

      I’m pretty sure Google uses their TPU chips

      The Coral ones? They don’t have nearly enough RAM to handle LLMs - they only have 8MB RAM and only support small Tensorflow Lite models.

      Google might have some custom-made non-public chips though - a lot of the big tech companies are working on that.

      instead of a regular GPU

      I wouldn’t call them regular GPUs… AI use cases often use products like the Nvidia H100, which are specifically designed for AI. They don’t have any video output ports.

  • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    6 个月前

    The confounding part is that when I do get offered an “AI result”, it’s basically identical to the excerpt in the top “traditional search” result. It wasted a fair amount more time and energy to repeat what the top of the search said anyway. I’ve never seen the AI overview ever be more useful than the top snippet.

  • Facebones@reddthat.comEnglish
    331·
    6 个月前

    Its not even hidden, people just give zero fucks about how their magical rectangle works and get mad if you try to tell them.

    • Halosheep@lemm.eeEnglish
      33·
      6 个月前

      I use generative ai sometimes, and I find it useful for certain usecases.

      Are you just following the in ternate hate bandwagon or do you really think it’s no good?

    • sunbeam60@lemmy.oneEnglish
      1015·
      6 个月前

      I don’t know if lemmians (lemmings?) live in the same world I live in; I find AI a HUGE productivity boost, in search, writing, generation, research.

      Of course one has to check results carefully, it won’t remove the need for quality checks and doing stuff yourself. But as a sparring partner, an idea creator and an assistant, I am convinced people who make use of Claude/GPT etc will outperform people who don’t by a wide margin.

      • cows_are_underrated@feddit.orgEnglish
        14·
        6 个月前

        Ai devinetively has its use cases and boosts productivity if used right. The stuff google did is just the most bullshit ever seen. Its an example of useless Ai because of the “need” to use Ai.

        • sunbeam60@lemmy.oneEnglish
          5·
          6 个月前

          Ok that we agree entirely. Google is worried that their investors will worry because their investors are too dumb to understand that LLMs and Search are two separate things and one isn’t necessarily better because it uses the other.

      • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        132·
        6 个月前

        I find LLM’s to be entirely worthless in any kind of engineering analysis or scientific reference. It has done nothing but hinder the design process and we have moved entirely away from it as it’s a complete joke.

        We will enter another AI winter soon enough.

            • sunbeam60@lemmy.oneEnglish
              12·
              6 个月前

              I’m not saying I can. I don’t use Google, haven’t for years, so can’t make statements about the quality of its search. Intuitively search isn’t benefitting from the use of AI.

              • sandbox@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                6 个月前

                You wrote:

                I find AI a HUGE productivity boost, in search

                Then when pushed, you walk it back:

                search isn’t benefitting from the use of AI

                Why make your initial comment of support if you just walk back on it? Got some money riding on it or something?

      • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        54·
        6 个月前

        that’s gonna be mighty useful when we’ve destroyed the planet. Also, you are not working with AI. You are working with a LLM.

        • sunbeam60@lemmy.oneEnglish
          27·
          6 个月前

          Against bunker oil shipping, coal power plants, diesel cars, cement, our consumate appetite for plastic, gas and oil based heating, air travel, cooling buildings to 19 C when the outside is 38 C, ammonia based fertiliser, fast fashion, maintaining perfect green lawns in desert environments, driving monster trucks with one passengers on 18-lane highways, dismantling public transport, building glass skyscrapers with no external shade, buying new TVs every second year etc etc I think AI’s reputation as a carbon emitter, especially considering most of Azure, CG and AWS runs on renewables, is overblown and used as a battering ram in a larger battle that comes from very real concerns about how AI is changing our society.

          • quick@thelemmy.clubEnglish
            61·
            6 个月前

            most of Azure, CG and AWS runs on renewables

            Yeah definitely believing that

          • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            43·
            6 个月前
            1. if each of those contributors to wrecking our planet points to the other causes as a justification to not limit their own damage, we’re fucked
            2. it’s not AI. It’s large language models. Glorified statistical text prediction without any originality. It just appears to some naive humans as original because it regurgitates ideas to them that other people have had but they just hadn’t heard before
            3. despite the misnaming, I agree that there’s a real concern that it makes the majority of users even more stupid than mankind on average already is :/
      • Balder@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        6 个月前

        It’s more that there is a vocal minority against it. I’d guess most of us are mostly neutral about it, we see the problems and the benefits but don’t see the need to comment everywhere about our feelings towards it.

  • ArchRecord@lemm.eeEnglish
    272·
    6 个月前

    If only they did what DuckDuckGo did and made it so it only popped up in very specific circumstances, primarily only drawing from current summarized information from Wikipedia in addition to its existing context, and allowed the user to turn it off completely in one click of a setting toggle.

    I find it useful in DuckDuckGo because it’s out of the way, unobtrusive, and only pops up when necessary. I’ve tried using Google with its search AI enabled, and it was the most unusable search engine I’ve used in years.

      • ArchRecord@lemm.eeEnglish
        93·
        6 个月前

        I haven’t had any problems myself.

        In fact, I regularly use their anonymized LLM Chat tab to help out with restructuring data, summarizing some more complex topics, or finding some info that doesn’t readily appear near the top of search. It’s made my search experience (again, specifically in my circumstance) much better than before.

  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    318·
    6 个月前

    whats up with these shit ass titles? It’s not even REMOTELY hidden, it takes two fucking seconds of googling to figure this shit out.

    The entire AI industry was dependent on GPU hardware manufacturers, and nvidia is STILL back ordered (to my knowledge)

    This is like saying that crypto has a hidden energy cost.

    • Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      11·
      6 个月前

      It’s hidden in the sense that the normal user does not see the true cost on their energy bill. You perform a search and get the result in milliseconds. That makes it easy to get the false impression that it’s just a minor operation. It’s not like driving a car and watching the the fuel gauge and see the consumption.

      Of course one can research how much energy Google consumes and find out the background – IF you’re interested. But most people just use tech and do not question or even understand.

    • Ibuthyr@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      6·
      6 个月前

      For you it might be clear. For the overwhelming majority of people, this is news. People don’t know shit about tech. Most would assume the AI thingy does its thing on the local computer.

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        6 个月前

        Most would assume the AI thingy does its thing on the local computer.

        good thing nvidia having a massive market cap isn’t a big news item, it’s worth noting that nobody is talking about all the hardware that microsoft and google are building, surely nobody will talk about the fact that nvidia is backordered for years on hardware.

        It’s even better that modern consumer grade CPUs aren’t marketing for the NPU bits they have.

      • markon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        6 个月前

        Or there are bigger fish to fry like coal power plants and wasted idle etc. shit Google’s AI search results are wasteful in some cases but I’ve found it to actually improve my experience but I use a mix of search engines. You can always use one without AI or turn it off. It’s being pushed into almost every search though which I really don’t think is useful, and it would be best if they cached the answers instead of regeneration on command. They may cache some though.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
      74·
      6 个月前

      As long as we are talking about crypto, and I know this is shocking, turns out some people are using it for unsavory acts. It is okay if you want to sit down.

      • ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pubEnglish
        142·
        6 个月前

        There’s cocaine on literally every US Dollar and that currency is backed by oil, relatively speaking crypto is cleaner

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
          15·
          6 个月前

          I am against the drug war and I think the cocaine thing was an urban legend. Also the US dollar is not backed up by oil.

          • ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pubEnglish
            33·
            6 个月前

            The US Dollar is not only backed by oil, but also American banking imperialism.

            Im against the war on drugs too. But speaking of drugs, weed is schedule 1, where Xanax is schedule 4 (low risk of abuse). It’s completely upside down and not accurate. That said, the harmfulness of the substance and being for or against the war on drugs is completely separate from the fact that there’s cocaine on literally every single dollar bill. Money is the dirtiest thing in general, and by those metrics, the US Dollar is dirtier

      • whoisearth@lemmy.caEnglish
        31·
        6 个月前

        Some people? The vast majority of the crypto eco system is grifters and get-rich-quick rubes.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    202·
    6 个月前

    To be fair, it was never “hidden” since all the top 5 decided that GPU was the way to go with this monetization.

    Guess who is waiting on the other side of this idiocy with a solution? AMD with cheap FPGA that will do all this work at 10x the speed and similar energy reduction. At a massive fraction of the cost and hassle for cloud providers.