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Author rests the entire argument on ignoring the cumulative effects of individual use on a large scale. Whole lotta writing for such a small idea.
By the same logic, it follows:
IC engines are not bad for the environment.
Consuming meat is not bad for the environment.
A single vote has no effect on the outcome of an election.
One official taking a bribe isn't a big deal.
pitiful, abject nonsense
I think that a lot of the volume of GenAI queries.are unsolicited. Like google doing one for every search. Ban that and the datacenter volume drops a lot
I found the arguments about the environment convincing - he really does a great breakdown and comparison of other, individualist carbon emission sources and clearly explains why one person's heavy Chatgpt usage is nothing compared to, say, using a laptop for an hour. I still hate Chatgpt and the rest for all the OTHER reasons that we all know by now, but on the environmental point, I felt this article was persuasive. Overly long, but persuasive.
the author's Substack bio says "Director of EA DC"
his website explains the acronym - it's "Effective Altruism DC"
at this point, your alarm bells should start ringing.
but if you are blissfully aware, "effective altruism" is a goddamn scam. it is an attempt by Silicon Valley oligarchs and techbros to wrap "I shouldn't have to pay taxes" in a philosophical cloak. no more, no less.
take all of his claims about "no bro AI datacenters are totally fine don't listen to the naysayers" with a Lot's-wife-sized pillar of salt.
edit:
because I am bored and have a 2nd monitor while watching a football game, I did a bit more digging.
his website has an interesting page where he talks more about EA. this is from the "How I got into EA" section:
The local community in DC was pretty silent until around 2020 when an organizer brought a lot of people together, which is when I started to attend events. I had time and energy to volunteer running events and was eventually offered the role of part-time and then full-time paid director of EA DC.
note the use of the passive voice, and the complete omission of any names.
"an organizer" brought people together.
he "was eventually offered" the director role.
because EA DC is a 501c3 "charity" their finances are public. in 2024 they had revenue of $230k...and spent $190k of that on "executive compensation"
they don't seem to have a list of the "executives" who are being compensated...but how much you wanna bet this guy is the sole executive, getting paid $190k/year for what is basically just a paper charity?
sure enough, if you go to their website it looks like he's the only "executive". and apparently the only employee other than a "head of community".
but if you scroll down there's the charity's board of directors...and oh look the first person listed is the Director of Operations at Anthropic.
so yeah...this is not the guy you'd turn to if you wanted some sort of careful evaluation of the environmental downsides of AI datacenters. this is more like when you'd have guys in white labcoats talking about how cigarette smoking isn't that bad and it turns out they're working at a "research institute" funded by Marlboro.
Damn that's some next level detective work. Thx for the details
Edit: God it just gets worse and worse. I just peeked at the website for his "EA DC" org and their board of directors literally includes an exec from Anthropic. This guy is literally taking money from the AI industry. This article is a complete joke.
Consider mentionning this in the title for those who skip comments.
Maybe "[Likely sponsored by Antropic]"
Well, it is true that in the bigger picture there are larger fish to fry, but LLMs are so useless*, so their relative environmental impact feels like an especially stupid and pointless waste.
*I have tried them quite a bit and even ran open models myself, and I am still extremely underwhemed by their actual usefulness. Yes the first impression is cool, and they can write corporate emails well, but beyond that? I can't help but thinking people like the author of the text (although probably most of that was written by AI) are deluding themselves about the usefulness.
There are of course some narrow usecases like automatic transcription or text translations where modern machine learning is useful, but that stuff can run on a phone now 🤷
More than doubting their usefulness, I wonder whether they're hurting/slowing people more than they're helping.
There are study as well as anecdotes of people giving up vibe coding because it takes more effort to review and fix sloppy code than writing it yourself.
I occasionally come accros a well written online tutorial that seems to answer the exact problem I'm trying to solve. And later realize it's a complete dead end with made up API/function names but it looks really convincing. Those are likely AI-generated tutorials with severe hallucinations and bad/zero disclosure.
I'm now blacklisting whole websites using ublock to avoid wasting more of my time reading that.
Agreed 100%. I started doubting everything this writer was saying as soon as he started espousing the usefulness of Chatgpt.