In the late 2000s there was a push by a lot of businesses to not print emails and people use to add a ‘Please consider this environment before printing this email.’
Considering how bad LLMs/‘ai’ are with power consumption and water usage a new useless tag email footer should be made.
I don’t think regular people really understand the power needed for AI. It’s often taught that we just have it. But not where it comes from.
True, but most people don’t realise how little not printing an email ‘helped’ the environment.
It would have been significant if a lot of people did it.
I’m doing my part. Can’t remember the last time I had to print anything.
I don’t think regular people really understand how little 3W per request is. It’s the energy you take up by eating 3kcal. Or what your WiFi router uses in half an hour. Or your clothes dryer in 5 seconds.
I wonder how the power usage of running an LLM locally compares to playing a modern game at high settings. Can they be very different?
I would compare LLM to bit mining. But I’m not an expert
To be fair they never cared about environment. A paper is something easy to recycle and certainly not the most polluting material to produce.
It was more about saving money, greenwashing and pushing a conversion towards digital archiving (which is much more efficient that paper)
Text generation uses hardly any energy at all, though. Most phones do it locally these days. In fact, it likely takes less energy to generate an email in 5 seconds than it would take for you to type it out manually in 5 minutes with the screen on the whole time.
But it’s everywhere now and it’s almost impossible to use mainstream services without it being used. I can just go to Google anymore, type a search query and get a reply without AI bs being used. How long before it’s baked into the GMail compose window and it doesn’t without me wanting to.
Then we stop using it.
I think we need a Rule 34 of open-source programs:
Rule 34: If it exists, there is an open-source version of it
i) If no open-source version exists, it is currently being created
ii) If no open-source version is being created, you must create it yourself
Thanks. You reminded me to turn Gemini off. Did that once and it came back on.
Doesn’t gmail already do this? I seem to remember there being ‘suggested response’ options before I turned it off in the settings that were definitely AI generated. That option being presented to me creeps me out because you can’t know if what you’re receiving was actually written by the person sending it.
WHO IS USING AI TO RESPOND TO EMAILS? Like, by the time to “craft” the ultimate response, you could have just written the email.
This may be my bias as an engineer (not software, but chemical), there’s not really much faffing about in an email. You just politely respond, or politely make a query. It’s not very long, typically, and even if it is, an LLM isn’t gonna help you.
You don’t have to sugar coat anything unless there’s some fuck up you’re trying to soften. You just go “Hi xyz, could you please clarify when the design temperature is changing here?”.
Wtf is there you can use an LLM for in an email?
I have only used it for software troubleshooting, as it’s quite nifty there, even if it’s information is out of date, it gets versions confused, etc, still gets me out of a bind or spits out random ideas to try.
But emails? Those short form messages, just barely longer than texts?
Are we actually serious? It’s not a report
I don’t know if it would help, but you could also add links to articles about this. You could put hyperlinks behind numbers - like “[see 1, 2, 3, 4…]”.
Here are some if you want to do this: https://www.wired.com/story/new-research-energy-electricity-artificial-intelligence-ai/
https://web.archive.org/web/20240318115424/https://disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-a-data-center-boom/
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-is-revitalizing-the-fossil-fuels
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-ai-power-home-appliances/
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-center-gas-emissions-tech
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/23/arizona-data-centers-navajo-power-aps-srp/
Na, that’s too useful the point is to be virtue signalling
you need to generate about 2 million emails (using qwen) for the carbon emission of one transatlantic flight, personal use is definitely not the power hungry shit you imagine
I think they’re pointing out the 180-turn in so-called “priorities.” Companies once claimed to want something done for the “sake of the environment,” but now they have no problem using resource-intensive AI without any acknowledgement of how bad it is for the environment.
Both things (avoiding LLM written mail and the paper printouts) are meaningless greenwashing gestures in comparison to - for example - the additional car use due to “return to office”-bullshit.
That’s true. I don’t disagree with you, I just think we’re reading this post differently.
Companies lie about their reasons all the time, especially when they claim they’re doing something for the environment. I interpreted this post as another example pointing out their hypocrisy, not as “this is the one and only thing companies lie about.”
The basic assumption of the post is that GenAI is particularly energy and water hungry, which is not true. The energy my computer used while commenting under this post, which i can estimate to about 300W since my first comment, equals about 300 requests. It would have been climate friendlier to generate my responses with ChatGPT instead of typing them out.
