This might belong in some circlejerk sub, but I think it’s somewhat clever. Basically, if AI datacenters get shut down, the power that would’ve been used to generate AI slop could be used for magnificent things. I mean, it’s purely clean energy because instead of using gas or oil, you take energy that COULD be used for something useless and put it to better use. Think of all the applications.
- We could power countless electric cars, trains, and bikes.
- We could power countless medical devices like pacemakers and defibrillators.
- We could power countless lights in people’s homes.
All this could be accomplished by not building massive datacenters. What’s more is that there could be countless gallons of clean drinking water used for surgical cleaning and chemistry that would otherwise serve to cool the amount of datacenter power. Think of all the possibilities!
If only Sam Altman could understand this…!
The free market is generally pretty good at allocating scarce resources as long as the price reflects that. I don’t think the majority of AI usage is really for making AI slop. I think it’s far outweighed by passive, unprompted AI usage. For each person generating an AI slop anime girl, there are a hundred people who are simply making a Google Search, and that triggers an AI response whether they want one or not. And a lot of times, AI features which say “click here to generate a summary” or something like that tends to be very wasteful by having each individual user clicking “generate” triggering a separate AI prompt, when they could instead just run the generation once for the first user and then cache the result for everyone else. Instead, every user who clicks “generate” will cause all the computations to be redone. That’s incredibly wasteful, and I think it’s because AI in general encourages people to be lazy.
I think a lot of progress could be made by simply levying a one-cent tax on AI prompts. Each prompt provided to a large-language model or to an image generation model will incur the tax, which will be used to fund renewable energy projects. That way, the legitimate uses of AI will not be hindered (research, medicine, automating boring tasks, etc.) while the junk “spammy” uses will be filtered out, because you’re now forcing any AI query which is made to generate at least one cent of value to society, which is a very low bar to reach but so many AI uses cases surprisingly fail. This also adds friction to each AI interaction, because no company can now afford to give users free AI prompts, which will be great in general for weaning users off the practice of outsourcing their thinking to AIs. Way too many people trust AI for everything, including blindly believe whatever hallucinations it gives you. Adding a paywall to the AI means that you have to really think about whether your use of AI is really actually productive or not before you do so.
The “free market” doesn’t exist and has never existed.
A perfectly free market? No, it doesn’t and never will exist. A mostly-free market which, with appropriate nudging, emulates 90% of the behaviour of the market that appears in an economic textbook? That does exist or can exist and we can manipulate it to our benefit
There’s no way you’re referring to the stock market? Where in the world is this free market actually practiced?
I would add that the tax should only be applied to AI prompts that actually get sent to some datacenter, just because it would be unreasonable to track self hosted models (and might also encourage companies to get all that AI shit they are shoving down our throats to run locally).
The concern is that AI data centres use far too much electricity. A joule is a joule regardless of whether it is consumed in a building with the Amazon logo on it, or in a server room located in a former janitor’s closet in a company’s offices.
Hell, even a 0.1¢ tax would be effective.
I think this could be elegantly solved by saying that (1) anyone who controls the computer system which executes a prompt for a large language model or image generator is liable to pay a tax of one-tenth cent per prompt, and (2) any organisation or person who would pay less than [$/€]100 a year in this tax is exempt from paying. This means anyone can use their own computing resources to run up to 100,000 tax-free prompts, so hobbyists and organisations that have AI but use it only sparingly as needed would not pay any tax, but any organisation which either spams AI or lets users spam AI would be taxed quite heavily. Besides, those people are already charged retail rates for electricity so they are already penalised in the form of high power bills if they waste electricity on AI nonsense.
Google handles 5 trillion searches per year, so if they want to provide every single user with an AI summary then they would need to cough up $5 billion a year in AI tax, which is a ludicrous amount. That would single-handedly fund the US green energy transition If they actually did that. A solar panel on every roof and a wind turbine in every garden. If users really want to use the AI then Google can charge them for it, maybe by requiring that they subscribe to their Google One thing or something. Either way, fewer people choose to use AI, Google profits from those that do, less misinformation from AI hallucinations, and less energy wasted on garbage AI prompting. Everyone wins.