The Real GenAI Issue

The average ChatGPT query uses 0.34 Wh (0.12 kJ, 0.3kcal) and 0.32ml of water.

This means if you ask it one question every two minutes, you're using about as much energy as a 10W LED lightbulb.

If you use it 5000 times, you'll waste the energy of a medium-sized pizza, and water amount equivalent to how much you'd need to wash your hands after that pizza.

Sources:

Energy and water use: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

Typical water pipe flow (with perlator/aerator): 3.5 L/min: https://www.enu.hr/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/7.-Racionalno-... (US stats are 4x that: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/environment/edu...) Time required to properly wash hands: https://www.hzjz.hr/sluzba-zdravstvena-ekologija/pravilno-pr...

At some point I was even hearing the claim that digitization (e.g. GenAI) was finally divorcing the tight connection between economic growth and resource extraction. I'd bet it's incorrect, but it's much less fanciful than thinking that growth in oil or beef would help us grow without strip mining the earth.

Bray's first issue —the influence of GenAI on labour's (and also the democratic people's) decreasing power versus capital— is much more important and interesting.

Me, 10 months ago:

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Someone on Twitter said: "Do not fear AI. Fear the people and companies that run AI".

After all, it's the same industry that came up with pervasive and invasive tracking, automated insurance refusals, automated credit lookups and checks, racial ...ahem... neighbourhood profiling for benefits etc. etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41414873

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Reduced payroll to a large portion of the members of the already struggling and shrinking middle class. Thinking that some natural law says that jobs that will come back will automatically also be middle class

This is discussed ad nauseum, and the carbon accounting is very poorly done.

Looking at the capital and operating expenses of datacenters is the right way to think about it. Nothing about that tells me that AI is environmentally worse than driving a big vanity pickup truck bigger, owning a large house, having lots of offspring, or taking many international flights.

There are numerous examples of disruptive technologies that reduce labor costs and the world has gotten better over time not become a dystopia.

I’m sure there will be winners and losers and it will take time adjust, but dramatic increases in productivity will make a better world, because it will take less effort for you to get what you want to get.

True enough!

> They’re doing this for exactly one reason: They think they can discard armies of employees and replace them with LLM services, at the cost of shipping shittier products.

I imagine that they believe they can discard armies of employees and replace them with LLM services, shipping products at either the same level of quality for the same price or for a lower level of quality at a lower price.

> The first real cost is hypothetical: What if those business leaders are correct and they can gleefully dispose of millions of employees?

I am absolutely certain that when Tim Bray needs a ditch dug on his property, he does not insist that the contractors use spoons. I am pretty sure that he does not insist that the timber for his house be hand-sawn only. I am pretty sure that he does not drive a horse and buggy. I am pretty sure that he does not grow all his own food by hand, nor does he require that all his food be grown by subsistence farmers. I am absolutely certain that the computers he uses for work and play are not hand-built from raw inputs like sand and rubber trees, but are instead the end product of a massive industrial supply chain no single man can hold in his head. I think well enough of him that I expect he is not gleeful at the thought of how many more jobs he could create if only he abstained from all technology developed after, say, 753 B.C.; why will he not extend that same grace to business executives?

I’m being a bit ridiculous, but that’s kind of the point. Technological innovations free up labour for more productive uses. If you go back far enough, most of our ancestors lived miserable, short lives of back-breaking effort. It wasn’t until the 1920 census that the majority of Americans lived in cities.

There’s no ‘mental stench’ (to use his infelicitous phrase) involved in using technology to reduce the amount of precious human labour required to achieve an end. Desktop publishing made high-quality output accessible to a much larger number of people than before; so too has generative AI.

Gen AI exists to wrest control of information from the internet into the hands of the few. Once upon a time, the Encyclopaedia was a viable business model. It was destroyed as a business model once the internet grew to the point that a large percentage of the population was able to access it. At that point, information became free, and impossible to control.

Look at google's "AI summaries" that they've inserted at the top of their search results. Often wrong, sometimes stupid, occasionally dangerous - but think about what will happen if and when people divert their attention from "the internet" to the AI summaries of the internet. The internet as we know it, the free repository of humanity's knowledge, will wither and die.

And that is the point. The point is to once again lock up the knowledge in obscure unmodifiable black boxes, because this provides opportunity to charge for access to them. They have literally harvested the world's information, given and created freely by all of us, and are attempting to sell it back to us.

Energy use is a distraction, in terms of why we must fight Gen AI. Energy use will go down, it's an argument easily countered by the Gen AI companies. Fight Gen AI because it is an attempt to steal back what was once the property of all of us. You can't ban it, but you can and absolutely should refuse to use it.

Low empathy has been an issue with humanity since day 1. I wouldn't even know how to begin to fix it. It'll probably still be an issue long after we're dead. If it really bothers you I recommend meditation/therapy/etc.

Don't expect action on climate change until a few million in western countries are killed. Humans are terrible at slow-moving disasters. My parents both died early from being sedentary, despite my best efforts to get them to work out.

With luck, smarter decision-making with genAI might actually improve some societal systems.

If you're willing to only look at the downsides of an issue and not at its upsides, then you can a-priori reject the entirety of human advancement.

There will downsides and their will be people negatively effected, but democratizing ability has never been a net negative.