I tried to post this to Reddit but for some reason it keeps getting removed by filters. I normally just lurk on Lemmy but I decided to make an account because I’m so over that stupid platform.
ANYWAY
Last night on my flight home I noticed that the person in front of me was using ChatGPT. I got nosy so I looked closer and found out that they were actually using ChatGPT to write the content for a program of a sustainability and climate conference. They specifically included a section about “dirty” energy sources and the harm that results from energy producers supplying data centers. I was floored.
I am not sure if this was the final product or just a draft, but I find it pretty gross and ironic that the AI that is fueling the climate crisis and responsible for the rapid development of data centers that are doing irreparable damage to local communities and ecosystems is being employed to create the materials for a sustainability conference. Maybe start with looking in the mirror first?
I looked up the company, and turns out this program might be part of a Keynote Livestream that is featuring the Mayor of San Fransisco lol.
The only way to control people’s behavior is to change the real world cost. Want to decrease consumption of high resource and CO2 foods? Stop externalizing their cost. Want to decrease people’s AI usage? Stop externalizing costs. Want to encourage people to switch to lower CO2 transport? Stop externalizing costs. Want to encourage upcycling and decrease waste? Stop externalizing costs. Want companies in any business to decrease their ecological impact? Stop externalizing costs. If we actually charged what things cost then any market would naturally correct itself. If we just globally charged what things actually cost then that would about solve the situation almost overnight.
If we actually charged what things cost then any market would naturally correct itself.
If we can change what things cost then it demonstrates the market isn’t natural. The problem we’re running into here is that the market and politics are intertwined, so the market can set the prices by lobbying the government to change what things cost.
So you have to defeat the market first before we can actually set prices to include the real costs of carbon emissions.
Cost isn’t always measured in dollars. The problem with how we externalize the costs is by looking at it from a money perspective.
We’re racking up an absolutely enormous environmental debt on margin, and we are not preparing at all to repay that debt.
The cost would ideally just be the actual or true cost including the environmental impact as best as that can be calculated. You are right though that wealth and power are not indistinct and corporations use their wealth to increase the externalization of costs of their services or products to maximize their immediate profits. The intention of a government is to police the market, not the other way around. Our problem with humanity committing a slow suicide is that it’s reversed.
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Soon you can cripple the US by knocking chatgpt off of the internet.
I am just waiting for Claude code to go down at work to see the aftermath. Imagine if it was out for a week? People would probably wait rather than writing code by hand again haha. I think it would be so funny to see everyone freak out.
Maybe they would let us code by hand again
I’ve been reading about claude agents being fed back into themselves like a recursion. The programmers say they start losing the ability to understand what it is doing after a while. Imagine having that code base dumped on you.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
dude, they were on a flight, you know they’re not serious from the get go
https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/life-after-oil/2016/02/11/how-far-can-we-get-without-flying
Hour for hour, there’s no better way to warm the planet than to fly in a plane.
You can’t collect per diem or get credit card points from a virtual conference though. Think of their bank accounts!
Oh that could be me… I work at a major organization that directly interacts at the highest levels of climate policymaking. You know what I recently learned from our comms team? Policymakers are asking AI about the options in front of them. So they advised us to feed as much data as we can into these AIs, so that when policymakers ask AI about their options, they will not only get the lobbyist answer. What a world to live in.
So they advised us to feed as much data as we can into these AIs, so that when policymakers ask AI about their options, they will not only get the lobbyist answer.
That’s not how AI works though. You can’t feed data into an AI in a way that affects the answers other people get. It’s not learning anything in real-time like that.
If you want to “feed data” into an AI system all you can really do is publish that data publicly and wait for it to be scraped up into their training data.
Actually, most ai companies train on your prompts, so that is how it works. Might not make it in until the next model though.
That’s exactly how it works. Likely a custom GPT or a specific custom model. Probably sometime like Palintir providing it. So the climate nonprofit is told to throw their white papers into a void, then lobbyists do the same.
That is how AI works.
Most AI… Gosh, I’m not sure what to call it here, models, agents, tools? Whatever, most AI things nowadays don’t just rely on their dataset, they can also make queries out to the web. So, yes, making sure AI tools can easily get answers from your website is a real thing companies need to be aware of. Because the reality we live in now is that most people’s search engines have an AI Summary at the top, and that’s all most people are going to look at. Most people were already stopping at the first search result prior to this.
It has a term I think? AIO maybe? I don’t remember. Basically like SEO but for AI.
I looked it up real quick. I hate the name of the term. It’s AEO “answer engine optimization” fuck that, we’re fucked
Edit: I guess the word answer doesn’t necessarily mean CORRECT answer, but to me it leans that way. I think response may have been a better word to use there
REO was already taken by Speed Wagon, sadly.
SES (Slop Engine Sloptimization)
The frustrating thing is that it’s not sloptimizing, it’s just the meta that search engines have forced people to adhere to if they want to get good results.
To be honest, I don’t really know what all it entails. It may or may not require changes that make the site less human friendly. There’s one version of it where it actually improves sites. Like if it means using semantic HTML better, then it would make the site more accessible. But it could also mean organizing things differently that are less human friendly. I haven’t looked into it enough to judge.
Accurate, perhaps they were referring to SEO and ensuring that web crawlers from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or other corporations stumble upon their perspective on things during the collection process for their next training dataset.
But unless you work at one of these LLM companies, you cannot influence an already trained model directly at a macro level. You can only tailor the answers it provides within your own account settings, which does not affect the output for anyone else.
I can’t wait until we unlock custom AI training micro transactions where you can influence what a ChatGPT or Copilot user sees for the low low fee of $15 per KB of supplied data plus $.01 per token referenced.
Just link to this when referencing “irony”
This website is being inundated with pro-AI losers.
Read the name of the comm you’re in if this is triggering you.
If you’re still having trouble, I guess you better ask black box autocorrect to help you figure it out.
Its a good reminder that capitalism and its infinite urgency and extraction ideology is fueling the climate crisis and AI is just the latest and worst iteration of it.
Needing to fly because our lives are so squshed by that same capitallism that makes taking a bus or train impractical is yet another symptom
Soon LLM tools will become a luxury for the more affluent like flying as prices adjust up to correct for the absurd costs
God forbid we build more high speed rail.
I’ve talked about this a lot, but it pisses me off so much that so many small towns where I live in Georgia (and maybe most states in the US) have little decommissioned train stops. But the train lines are still used. My parents live in a town with one. I live in a town with one. They’re both within walking distance. In a better world I’d be able to catch a train to go see them without driving.
Yup.
Everything is so urgent and we’re so wired, is it really so hard to believe someone reaches for a tool to lessen a cognitive load when they have 12 other things to juggle?
That is how AI has bern marketed. And reaching for that tool is only human.
Unfortunately, it is killing the planet. All because of the soup du jour of capitalism and tribalism under anthropocentrism.
Can’t wait for them to field a question to clarify a point. :)
“Hold on, it is slow to respond today.”
It is gross that someone who believes in sustainability would use AI for a thing IRL specifically dedicated for sustainability. People really shouldn’t be using AI at all, but this is the worst version of it.
Cognitive dissonance, or grifters just grifting
they used the weapon of the enemy.
The master’s tools
Maybe start by minding your own business. I’d hate to have you sitting behind me on a plane while I might be writing something that’s private.
I’d love to mind my own business, but I’m currently melting in a historic heatwave caused by assholes billionaires and petrochemical executives continually adding gasoline to the fire that is the climate crisis
Yeah pretty sure that makes it all of our business
Don’t get your panties in a wad. There is nothing private about using ai.
The issue here is using a llm to write protentialy really important documentation that should really be backed by real science.
The issue is not the obvious hypocrisy.
This is a variation on the “you said, on an iphone line” ai is everywhere people will use it and can still meaningfully criticize wasting tremendous amount of energy.
How many of y’all do not eat meat, do not shop online, only consume content from ethical non corporate sources?
The problem here is the blind confidence people have in these shallow text machines.
The only exception to the “backed by real science” in any writing/publication should be art (ie fiction books).
Except unlike smartphones that are so ubiquitous and essential for life today, using chatbots is entirely elective and unnecessary.
Meat is an important source of essential nutrition and eschewing it is a luxury to many people in the world. Online shopping, in this day and age, is very frequently the only way to acquire certain goods we need. It is practically impossible to stay informed as to the state of the world without reading news from corporate sources.
There is nothing essential or unavoidable about ChatGPT. On the contrary, they and their audience would be much better served by not using it.
It’s a self-correcting problem. The coming era of scarcity and sobriety will make these behaviors impossible.
