Andy Masley: A Cheat Sheet for Why Using ChatGPT Is Not Bad for the Environment

If you want to prompt ChatGPT 40 times, you can just stop your shower 1 second early. If you normally take a 5 minute shower, set a timer for 299 seconds instead, and you’ll have saved enough water to justify 40 ChatGPT prompts.

If you want to reduce your water footprint, avoiding ChatGPT will never make a dent.

Last year I wrote that if it takes you more than 6 seconds to walk to your thermostat to turn it off, it's more environmentally responsible to ask an LLM to do it for you. I also noted that while they use the same amount of energy, having an M4 Mac mini idling doing literally nothing all day is seen as quirky while generating hundreds of images on Midjiurney was seen as an attack on the environment. Masley brings more comparisons to the table in a very effective way as well.

And it can't be stressed enough that this 3 watt-hours number is possibly 10x the actual energy use of LLMs, so read all of his comparisons as potentially 10x more ridiculous than they already sound.

And yet I still see people insisting that ChatGPT is "destroying" the environment. If I can be a little rude, I just don't see how you can say that with any bit of seriousness if you've actually looked at the data for even a minute. I’m happy to change my mind if I’m presented with new data that shows the scale to be 100x what we think it is today. After all, I used to think it was a disaster until I looked into it beyond the (intentionally misleading) headlines.

If you don't like LLMs for other reasons, then have those arguments. But I feel tacking on the, "it's destroying the environment," point actually reduces the credibility of your argument at this point. If you're going to tack this onto your complaints, you need to bring new data, because the data that's out there doesn't back you up.