Raw LLM Responses

So I’m not pro or anti AI. I am anti the way these models are trained, and pushed as consumer products that everyone should use, but like the tech itself is really cool barring the less than ethical ways its creators have gone about it’s creation, marketing, and monetization. I do have a nitpick about what you’ve said though. So the biggest nitpick I have is the environmental impact of AI. You specifically cited an article about water consumption, but I often hear a lot of talk about electricity consumption, and the exact same rhetoric was used against NFTs and crypto in general. So on the surface level, these are valid complaints, but if you dig deeper I feel like there is an important reason these are not valid complaints. Specifically, when this happened with crypto, I used the data of people claiming that the carbon footprint was really bad (so if anything this data should be biased to make crypto and NFTs look worse than they are) and used it to to calculate their impact on the planet as a whole. Bitcoin, etherium, and NFTs combined (at the height of their cultural relevance, not today) were contributing something in the range of 0.01 or 0.001% of global carbon emissions. (I can find the exact numbers but it’s irrelevant to the point I’m making). The point is it’s negligible to the environment. And the problem is, when you have millions of people throwing a fit over 0.01% of carbon emissions, you steal attention away from the 99.99% of carbon emissions that need millions of people fighting against. But NFTs struck an emotional nerve with artists, and people understandably get very defensive over art. And now the same thing is happening with AI. The same arguments are being used, and while I have not done the math this time around (the data for electricity and water consumption of data centers isn’t as traceable as crypto data, so I’d take any claims on their consumption with a huge grain of salt), I’m fairly confident in saying the environmental impact is negligible compared to the entirety of environmental destruction from other sources. If this is about the environment, you’d talk about the biggest factors contributing to climate change and environmental destruction. But it’s not about the environment, it’s about AI, and talking about the environment is an ethos argument against AI. You are trying to get people emotionally against AI. That’s not bad or malicious, it’s just not fully transparent about the complexity of the situation. I can’t speak for all data centers, but I’m a plumber and pipe fitter, and as you can imagine, data centers need a lot of pipe to keep their computers cool. I’ve yet to work on one of these data centers, but typically, these are closed loop systems, they aren’t consuming water beyond their initial fill. In fact, it’s likely more cost effective and cooling effective to have a closed loop system. I’m sure that data centers do genuinely have a negative impact on water consumption, but I don’t intuitively understand why. In summary, I think that focusing on the environmental impact of AI is unintentionally harming environmental activism because you are pulling attention away from bigger environmental problems. If you personally view AI as a bigger threat to humanity than environmental destruction, then I suppose this is a valid trade off to you, but if you value the environment more, it may be worth researching the biggest factors, and spreading awareness over those. Off the top of my head, concrete production is a huge contributing factor to CO2 emissions. So is electricity production, but rather than emphasizing a specific thing we use electricity for that we could reduce consumption on, it makes way more sense to advocate for a fully green energy grid which solves ALL electricity related emissions, instead if just reducing them slightly.