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.
  • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    6 months ago

    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.

  • brrt@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    72·
    6 months ago

    I wonder what the power consumption of getting to the information in the summary is as a whole when using a regular search, clicking on multiple links, finding the right information and extracting the relevant parts. Including the expenditures of energy by the human performing the task and everything that surrounds the activity.

    There are real concerns surrounding AI, I wonder if this is truly one of them or if it’s just poorly researched ragebait.

  • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81·
    6 months ago

    This is terrible. Why don’t we build nuclear power plants, rollout a carbon tax, and put incentives for companies to make their own energy via renewables?

    You know the shit that we should have been doing before I was born.

    • Ragnarok314159@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      511·
      6 months ago

      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 months ago

      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 months ago

        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 months ago

          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 months ago

            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 months ago

            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 months ago

              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 months ago

                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 months ago

                  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?

  • alienanimals@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    6 months ago

    Wait till they learn about the environmental impacts of the oil industry, or the plastic industry.

  • repungnant_canary@lemmy.worldEnglish
    162·
    6 months ago

    I’m genuinely curious where their penny picking went? All of tech companies shove ads into our throats and steal our privacy justifying that by saying they operate at loss and need to increase income. But suddenly they can afford spending huge amounts on some shit that won’t give them any more income. How do they justify it then?

    • HappycamperNZ@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      Perception. If a company isn’t on the leading edge we don’t consider them the best.

      Regardless if you use them or not, if Google didn’t touch AI but Edge did you would believe edge is more advanced.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      6 months ago

      Because data is king and sessions are going to be worth a lot more than searches. Go through the following

      1. Talk to a LLM about what product to buy

      2. Search online for a product to buy

      Which one gives out more information about yourself?

    • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      7·
      6 months ago

      It’s another untapped market they can monopolize. (Or just run at a loss because investors are happy with another imaginary pot of gold at the end of another rainbow.)

  • DarkCloud@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    6 months ago

    If these guys gave a shit they’d focus on light based chips, which are in very early stages, but will save a lot of power.

      • DarkCloud@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        I was talking about the photonic chips from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, but looking into it the last update on that was four years ago.

        I know they were entangling photons, so there’s probably lots of research and parts to work on, but still, maybe it’s just not moving forwards.

        I’m not that familiar with the technology, but the benefits seem worthy of more news than they get.

        What are IBM’s efforts like?

  • Lyricism6055@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    6 months ago

    I switched to Kagi like 6 months ago and I still love it. Almost never have to go back to google except for maps.

  • BroBot9000@lemmy.worldEnglish
    720·
    6 months ago

    Where are all the people that were so damn pissed with Bitcoins power consumption now?

    Or was it never about the power consumption in the first place and now that little Timmy has an Ai buddy the waste of electricity is fine. SMH

    It’s far more important that every country fixes how it legally generates power that isn’t green. Make burning coal illegal already.

    • Nachorella@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      34·
      6 months ago

      You’re literally responding to an article criticising the power consumption of ai. What do you mean where are the people? They’re right here.

      • BroBot9000@lemmy.worldEnglish
        113·
        6 months ago

        The one article that’s popped up in months of nothing. There was a larger response from people when it was something they saw as worthless using large quantities of power compared to the “helpful ai” that’s consuming the power now.

        Shows that it never was about the environment in the first place. Hypocrites.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
          103·
          6 months ago

          Criticisms of Bitcoin didn’t really become popular until years after its introduction. Give it time.

          So-called “AI” is worthless too so they’ll get their turn.

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      13·
      6 months ago

      It’s a different debate because bitcoiners lose literally nothing to green power laws and banning coal. AI users would see a reduction in output quality/speed.

    • Bezier@suppo.fiEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      I’d think there’s some serious god damn overlap between the groups that are pissed about these things.

      Or was it never about the power consumption in the first place and now that little Timmy has an Ai buddy the waste of electricity is fine. SMH

      I don’t think I want to waste my energy on hating these hypocrite Timmies since I haven’t yet encountered a single one of them.

  • lone_faerie@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    6117·
    6 months ago

    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.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      6 months ago

      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 months ago

          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.

    • pycorax@lemmy.worldEnglish
      144·
      6 months ago

      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 months ago

        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.