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 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.