Please see my other comment about energy / water usage. Aside from that, I’m not disputing your other points.

Relevant except:

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ChatGPT is bad relative to other things we do (it’s ten times as bad as a Google search)

If you multiply an extremely small value by 10, it can still be so small that it shouldn’t factor into your decisions.

If you were being billed $0.0005 per month for energy for an activity, and then suddenly it began to cost $0.005 per month, how much would that change your plans?

A digital clock uses one million times more power (1W) than an analog watch (1µW). “Using a digital clock instead of a watch is one million times as harmful to the climate” is correct, but misleading. The energy digital clocks use rounds to zero compared to travel, food, and heat and air conditioning. Climate guilt about digital clocks would be misplaced.

The relationship between Google and ChatGPT is similar to watches and clocks. One uses more energy than the other, but both round to zero.

When was the last time you heard a climate scientist say we should avoid using Google for the environment? This would sound strange. It would sound strange if I said “Ugh, my friend did over 100 Google searches today. She clearly doesn’t care about the climate.” Google doesn’t add to our energy budget at all. Assuming a Google search uses 0.03 Wh, it would take 300,000 Google searches to increase your monthly energy use by 1%. It would be a sad meaningless distraction for people who care about the climate to freak out about how often they use Google search. Imagine what your reaction would be to someone telling you they did ten Google searches. You should have the same reaction to someone telling you they prompted ChatGPT.

What matters for your individual carbon budget is total emissions. Increasing the emissions of a specific activity by 10 times is only bad if that meaningfully contributes to your total emissions. If the original value is extremely small, this doesn’t matter.

It’s as if you were trying to save money and had a few options for where to cut:

You buy a gum ball once a month for $0.01. Suddenly their price jumps to $0.10 per gum ball.

You have a fancy meal out for $50 once a week to keep up with a friend. The restaurant host likes you because you come so often, so she lowers the price to $40.

It’s very unlikely that spending an additional $0.10 per month is ever going to matter for your budget. Spending any mental energy on the gum ball is going to be a waste of time for your budget, even though its cost was multiplied by 10. The meal out is making a sizable dent in your budget. Even though it decreased in cost, cutting that meal and finding something different to do with your friend is important if you’re trying to save money. What matters is the total money spent and the value you got for it, not how much individual activities increased or decreased relative to some other arbitrary point.

Google and ChatGPT are like the gum ball. If a friend were worried about their finances, but spent any time talking about foregoing a gum ball each month, you would correctly say they had been distracted by a cost that rounds to zero. You should say the same to friends worried about ChatGPT. They should be able to enjoy something that’s very close to free. What matters for the climate is the total energy we use, just like what matters for our budget is how much we spend in total. The climate doesn’t react to hyper specific categories of activities, like search or AI prompts.

If you’re an average American, each ChatGPT prompt increases your daily energy use (not including the energy you use in your car) by 0.001%. It takes about 1,000 ChatGPT prompts to increase your daily energy use by 1%. If you did 1,000 ChatGPT prompts in 1 day and feel bad about the increased energy, you could remove an equal amount of energy from your daily use by:

Running a clothes drier for 6 fewer minutes.

Running an air conditioner for 18 fewer minutes.