his brother wrote a book on climate change, they should talk to each other
I don’t usually comment on stuff like this but I feel like people should know that “standby” mode on appliances takes up about 40% more power than every data center on earth, of which only about 33% of which goes to AI. There are DEFINITELY environmental concerns surrounding data centers but it’s more about shoddily, quickly built ones rather than them existing at all.
And how’s progress on that front?
I don’t think there’s any progress on that front. Probably due to the lack of think pieces on it.
X is bad, but have you considered that Y is also bad?
More or less the point is: Have you considered that this is a psy op to keep you from using a revolutionary technology, keeping it in the hands of the elite?
What, you think every single company on Earth is dumb? You think that every programmer adopting it is dumb? You guys have no clue. You live in a little bubble where you studiously refuse to use this thing that you judge from three years ago. It would be sad, but it’s honestly just disturbing. We have a moment to use the most frontier models available. And we are going to lose that moment. And y’all, instead of using this technology to fight power, just bitch about it, as though that will do anything. As if your NIMBY nonsense will stop datacenters. As though you aren’t on Lemmy, USING DATACENTERS.
Literally who?
Hank Green. You blind?
This whole thing is so sad. Dude comes out with “I’m addicted to chatting with LLMs” and people pile on him for what? Not saving a glass of water while 100$ says all yall still eat meat and do a billion times worse than burning some LLM tokens? Disgusting responses all around.
In general the AI ludites are so tiring. I wish this energy would be spent on something actually impactful like murdering animals for entertainment - yes thats your cheese burger - but these addicts are quick to defend their own addiction while sneer at other significantly less harmful ones.
Gonna go burn more tokens just for your sake now.
I like Hank, and this is a shitty article.
That aside he should be facing a revolt.
Hes supposed to be a credible source, hes an educator, hes the modern day Bill Nye. It’s very hard to take anything he says as objective truth when his research and fact checking consists of asking an LLM. Considering hallucinations and straight up lies are not only common but not even unexpected for an LLM you can’t believe anything that comes from one nor can you believe anyone who uses one.
I don’t know about going that far - LLMs can be a great starting point …. As long as you click through to the sources rather than blindly accept
Creating science Youtube videos is not more important than maintaining a livable planet. AI is unnecessary and harmful, and should not be used outside of certain brute-force type of applications like protein folding, simulating new drug structures, or preliminary cancer diagnosis.
Golf courses use 30x the water that data centers use. Lawns, 100x. Standby mode for appliances costs more energy, by a lot. I wonder how much carbon emissions are offset by people no longer driving to work at call centers and the like.
Out of curiosity do you eat meat? .2% of water is used on data centers. 9.8% is used on beef. For carbon emissions one pound of beef consumed is equivalent to about 640,000 prompts.
AI is an environmental concern but the way people act about it is straight up ridiculous.
Edit: I am very proud of all of the vegans who unplug their appliances who are downvoting me. I, too, am a vegan who unplugs their appliances.
I don’t have a golf course or a membership so
thanks for that irrelevant factoid
and yes I am vegan, but eating meat is, in many cases, a culturally ingrained practice which people need time to understand the harms of. AI is not culturally ingrained for anyone with an actual culture. People need to eat - it shouldn’t be meat, but I’m not going to shame people for not seeing their harm yet. People do not need to generate slop. I am going to bully all AI users.
Do you think AI is mostly generating slop? Only like 5% of AI use is private individuals.
The point is that this is not actually an ecological hazard the way people say it is, and that there are much, much more pressing issues if we’re going to fix the environment. Literally all we would have to do to solve global warming is stop eating meat. You see anywhere near as much about that as you do datacenters? Which cause less than one percent of the environmental issues of meat?
I don’t hate all LLMs/ML models/“AI”.
I also don’t use them. I also don’t see a need to use them.
I work in tech and these “AI” things are little more than averaging the most common replies to a given input. Any question that’s been asked, especially those that are asked often, is well suited for an LLM chat bot. That’s good if you want a high level overview of a topic that you don’t know much about. If you want accuracy, you’ll need to dig a bit more, but overall, you’ll get a relatively good idea of the answer you’re looking for. That’s enough for most people.
I’m crazy. I like to deeply understand everything, so the high level, lack of detail, finesse, and accuracy of LLM chat bots is unacceptable for me, so I trend towards doing my own research. If I use an LLM at all, it’s just an augmented search engine. I’m more interested in its references than its response.
There’s also something to be said about making short clips of impossible things that some smaller YouTubers are using “AI” models for. Things that would take a long time for a graphics artist to create, and an editor to composite. Stuff that a small time YouTuber can’t really afford, but they can get good enough but clearly “AI” visuals to spice things up in their videos. The AI is just for display during transitions, it doesn’t affect the content being made in any meaningful way. I’ve seen Paul Hibbert do this a lot and his production team from what I know is basically him and his wife. I’m not even sure if he has an editor, or if he does it himself. He’ll go from a live shot of him talking about a product, do an AI transition, to another live shot of him continuing his discussion. Rather than a cut, or some kind of fade, wipe, or other simplistic transition, the generated images are of him, and only to add visual flavor. He also does some AI generated music stuff, which again, fair. He’s not exactly a musician, and unless he has the money to hire a musician, he either uses AI for the funny transition music or he uses an unrelated and unlicensed (or open licensed) song… It just adds flavor to his content, it builds on what he’s creating, it doesn’t shape what he’s creating. All of his scripts sound genuine, not AI created, so everything should be fine.
That, to me, is a good use of AI as a tool.
There’s too many bad examples for me to really cover them in any detail, but I’m sure everyone has seen the AI generated person being animated by AI, reading an AI generated script, using an AI generated voice sample. Even if the original source material is legit, is buried under so many layers of slop that I can’t bear to watch it.
For me, it entirely depends on what he’s using it for. It’s entirely not about the fact that he uses it. I’ll have to dig into it a bit to see what he’s doing, but from the comments I’ve read so far, it seems like the answer to what he’s using it for, is yes. He’s using it for everything… Not ideal.
