The 2025 version of "Please consider this environment before printing this email" should be "Please consider this environment before using A.I. to respond to this email"
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.
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🏞 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.
So I'm not saying RTO is worse than AI or vice versa. But do you have any data to back up that statement. I've been seeing nothing but news about AI data centers being an absolute nightmare for the planet. And even more so when corrupt politicians let then be built in places that already have trouble with maintaining normal water levels.
I get both are bad for the environment.
Editie: thanks for all the sources everyone. TIL
Well, real quick, my drive to the office is ~10 miles. My car gets ~3.1 miles/kwh. So let's say I use 3 KWH per trip, two trips a day, makes it 6KWH. A typical LLM request uses 0.0015KWH of electricity, so my single day commute in my car uses ~4000 LLM queries worth of electricity.
Yeah RTO is way worse, even for an EV that gets 91MPGe.
The thing is: those AI datacenters are used for a lot of things, LLM's usage amount to about 3% of usage, the rest is for stuff like image analysis, facial recognition, market analysis, recommendation services for streaming platforms and so on.
And even the water usage is not really the big ticket item:
The issue of placement of data centers is another discussion, and i agree with you that placing data centers in locations that are not able to support them is bullshit. But people seem to simply not realize that everything we do has a cost. The US energy system uses 58 trillion gallons of water in withdrawals each year. ChatGPT use about 360 million liters/year, which comes down to 0.006% of Americas water usage / year. An average american household uses about 160 gallons of water / day; ChatGPT requests use about 20-50 ml/request. If you want to save water, go vegan or fix water pipes.
Proof was during COVID:
In many megacities of the world, the concentration of PM and NO2 declined by > 60% during the lockdown period. The air quality index (AQI) also improved substantially throughout the world during the lockdown. SOURCE
I'm on my phone so I can't fully crunch the numbers, but I took a few minutes to poke around and I think I found the stats to put both of these in perspective.
Each query sends out roughly 4.32 grams of CO₂e (MLCO2), which may seem trivial on its own but adds up millions of queries a day, and you're looking at a staggering daily output. 1 million messages sent to ChatGPT is equivalent to 11,001 miles driven by an average gasoline-powered passenger vehicle
I started writing this assuming the opposite was true but unfortunately AI is a bigger environmental impact than an RTO. Which is honestly shocking. I hope someone corrects my math and tells me it isn't this dire. Work from should be the norm, but AI is truly just a massive environmental burden.
you got an error in magnitude there: its 5.32*10¹⁴ requests, so 532 407 407 407 407 requests
(2.3 × billion tonnes)/(4.32 grams)
2.3 billion tonnes = 2.3 trillion kilos = 2.3 quadrillion grams
≈ 532 407 000 000 000 requests needed for equivalence to Covid CO2 drop
≈ 912 500 000 000 requests made per year
calculator output below: