Study: AI writing, illustration emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans
news.ku.edu
news.ku.edu
> For the human writing process, we looked at humans’ total annual carbon footprints, and then took a subset of that annual footprint based on how much time they spent writing.
So, they aren't asking "does a human painter use more electricity to do a painting than an AI?" ... they are asking "is it more energy efficient for an AI to do a painting, or for a human to exist for several hours?".
That is, it doesn't take into account that the human would exist and have a carbon footprint anyway, even if not employed as an artist. It's devised as if employers created their employees, and seems to speculate about the potential energy saving in exterminating them.
> emissions of the computing devices used during the writing process are also considered
And their graphs show this as exceeding AI emission by a lot (due to AI being quick). This is a fair point, but they only needed this part. They shouldn't have thrown in the person's annual carbon footprint on top of this. Also, traditional art is presumably much less expensive in carbon.
And as somebody else pointed out, the use of devices will be part of the carbon footprint data in the first place, so it gets (partly) double-counted.
Now. I would compare this to how humans use more carbon to move than a car for example. This could lead to a conclusion that we should stop moving and use more efficient propulsion to move. In car centered societies people move less and then need to exercise after hours more to have any sort of fitness at all.
Of course there is a grunt body (and soul) crushing physical movement as well as there is a grunt soul (and body) crushing writing work. But there is also a middle ground that would be something we aim for.
This is changing very quickly, but even today you many not be aware of how well LLMs can create plausible drafts if you haven't seen what Claude 3 Opus can do with good prompting.
And it's a profound help for requirements generation, architecture/design explorations, legacy code annotation, test planning, and other technical things that I struggle to do on my own
So honestly it's not just replacing writers. It's eliminating my need for executive officers, technical officers, and PMs
I'm spending 20 month on GPT4 and I'm 2-3x more productive. Good stuff!
1. the human CO2e takes national, annual averages of CO2e and attributes the fraction of a year it takes to make a drawing to that drawing. they then _add_ to that the operating cost of whatever machine the person is using, which presumably is already a component of the national individual average?
2. The 'ChatGPT' baseline is GPT-3, not -3.5 or -4.
3. Training CO2e is from a cite I can't access, but is based on GPT-3 only.
4. They cite to some guy's post on Medium to estimate ChatGPT inference CO2e!? That admits it doesn't know the number of queries per day, or the compute time used, or the energy per compute (besides the TDP of A100s), or the carbon intensity of that energy???
This is a mess, and doesn't deserve a Nature publication.
“Whether it would work is not the issue.”
“So you think it might work?”
The open internet itself, yes, it won't survive the next few years - but then there's no stopping this. We could ban AIs in the west, which is the only place that sort of law might work, but Russia, North Korea, Iran, China - they'll still use it to mess with us.
I don't think you can encourage low fertility rate. I don't think we did in the west.
I also know there's nowhere to get our replacement from once the whole world is educated. Technological accelerationism might save us, or it might doom us.
It's all rather exciting, isn't it?
Pushing young women into the workplace so they can waste their lives grinding away at meaningless soul crushing fake corporate jobs instead of raising families. Degenerate Tinder/hookup culture. The "west" certainly encouraged it.
Natural selection will sort it out. No reproduction leads to extinction.
The strongest societies and cultures will survive. We'll see how it plays out over the next few generations.
I'm not moving to India, China, or Arabia, but they are certainly moving here. My city of ~2M people is now 50% foreign born and mass immigration is still at an all time high. The native populations here are reproducing at below replacement level. I have observed extreme demographic changes happening in real-time within a generation.
It is incredible to experience and none of us voted for it. There was no referendum. Nothing. Apparently this was UN policy and we had no choice.
No, you don't get to say that and not be laughed at. You can believe it, but you can't claim it. Democracy isn't just voting for what you want or complaining you didn't get a vote. It's also running for office on a platform that you believe is important. Unless you got elected and tried to implement your ideas and men in black came to stop you, you don't get to complain.
There are powerful influential people and entities in this world that make far reaching and wide impacting decisions without consulting or informing the public.
You have to be incredibly naive to believe all government officials, corporations, and financial elites are entirely transparent and honest
Perhaps you missed my question the first time. :))))
Are you as upset that young men are "wasting their lives grinding at meaningless soul crushing fake corporate jobs instead of raising families" as you are about women? Or are you just upset that the wimmenz escaped the kitchens they "belong" in?
If there were fewer people forced into work, maybe that would cut down the number of pointless/meaningless jobs.
Maybe it is better that only half of a couple are forced into corporate soul crushing jobs. It is subjective. Some women look at child raising / housewife duties as bondage and slavery. Natural selection rewards those who prioritize family. In any case we need generous maternity leave and options for part time employment.
Just noticed this:
> Or are you just upset that the wimmenz escaped the kitchens they "belong" in?
Spoken like a true incel who never spoke to a young lady who is raising a small child.
EDIT: Personally I don't give a shit. If a woman wants to be an astronaut or a mathematician or a ruthless psychopath CEO then go for it. I would encourage it. However if all women dedicated all of their energy to a career and have no babies then we become extinct. This is simple mathematics. Just because I point out a simple obvious mathematical fact doesn't mean that I am God and I created the universe this way. It was already this way long before I showed up and will continue to be this way long after I am gone from this world. Don't shoot the messenger.
Instead AI has just flooded the market with more content in a way that’s net additive. PLUS we’ll need to consider the energy impact of the AI we’ll all need to filter all this incoming AI spam.
Wow! The planet is saved, all you have to do is not multiply these values by the number of pages generated per second-
Thank you futurama for your carbon neutral solutions.
Capitalism has really done a number on the human pshcye.
What else was the human doing besides generating text and images while that CO2 was being produced? Is the human supposed to cease producing CO2 when they stop generating text and images?
This is some galaxy-brained shit. All this study really says is you should be using pen and paper.