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by PeterisP
676 days ago
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> its simply the fact they are a person living in the world. That's the whole point! If a task requires some time from a human, then you have to include the appropriate fraction of the (huge!) CO2 cost of "being a human" - the heating/cooling of their house, the land that was cleared for their lawn, and the jet fuel they burn to get to their overseas trip, etc, because all of those are unalienable parts of having a human to do some job. If the same task is done by a machine, then the fraction of the fixed costs of manufacturing the machine and the marginal costs of running (and cooling) it are all there is. |
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1) Pretend I want something written, and I want to minimize emissions. I can ask my AI or a freelancer. The total CO2 emissions of the entire industrial sector has nearly no relation to the emissions increase by asking the freelancer or not. Ergo, I should not count it against the freelancer in my decision making.
2) In the above scenario, there is always a person involved - me. In general, an AI producing writing must be producing it for someone, else it truly is a complete waste of energy. Why do the emissions from a person passively existing count when they are doing the writing, but not when querying?
3) If you do think this should be counted anyways, we are then missing emissions for the AI as the paper neglects to account for the emissions of the entire semiconductor industry/technology sector supporting these AI tools; it only computes training and inference emissions. The production of the GPUs I run my AI on are certainly an unalieanable part of having an AI do some job.