Idk, maybe I'm a big idiot, but I have issues with the points made in this article. I will concede the point that individual Chatgpt use is not that big of a deal, environmentally speaking. If I can trust the numbers in this article, then it has successfully convinced me that I dont need to worry about the energy cost or emissions or water use of individual prompts.

The case I take issue with is the author's point that LLMs are inherently useful. I don't care if chatgpt is kind of just a better Google. I still hate every other thing about it. Using Chatgpt is clearly developing psychoses in some people, and even for people like this author that can use it responsibly, I think it's just intellectually lazy. It encourages the user to abandon critical thinking and let the robot do it for you. What's more, as a search tool, it's destroying the internet. If no one ever goes to websites to read the info, why would people keep making websites with reliable information? Why should I even read this article? Why don't I just have chat summarize it for me, and I never give this author any traffic or money? Then of course there is the plagiarism problem...

So idk. Maybe now I'll stop harping on the environmental point. But I'm still going to avoid LLMs like the plague, because at their core I think they rob us of some of the finer points of a life well-lived. I'd rather spend my time poring through articles to understand the why and how of a question, rather than have a robot just spit the "what" out at me.

Edit: well I shared this elsewhere and someone pointed out that this dude is a self-avowed "Effective Altruist", which boils down to "he's a stooge for techbros and he probably takes a paycheck under the table to write these articles". So....i no longer feel that I can trust the numbers in this article. I'm back to having heavy concerns about the environmental impact of AI.