This seems like a waste of time to me when you could instead focus on Coal or things that matter
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This is part of a larger UK campaign to make people feel bad about energy usage while Starmer is filling increasingly large amounts of UK infrastructure with AI stuff that requires 100x the amount of power.
Only 100x?
I agree with you. Most energy comes from renewables these days, and your wi-fi usage is a negligible amount in the scale of things. How about going after corporate energy waste like AI instead?
AI is negligible compared to Coal & private jets etc. Or just gross spending by billionaires
It currently is negligible. Depending on how long this hype train lasts it may stop being negligible. Coal is on the decline. Private jets and careless billionaires are growing problems, but not as fast as ai. All need handling one way or another.
I’m anti-ai for privacy, copyright reasons etc.
But the environmental impact is negligible, streaming Netflix uses way more resources than thousands of AI prompts (including training)
If we watched less YouTube it would make a much bigger difference than if we didn’t use AI
Fair point, after some googling I see I was significantly overestimating ais impact despite your comment previous comment, my bad.
Do you have a source for the streaming v AI power consumption thing? I don’t want to be an ass, just genuinely curious. When I run jellyfin and stream something from my home server, it draws 35 watts. If I run an ai model on my GPU, it draws way more than that.
I can’t remember where I first saw it, I quickly found this
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about
Maybe not the best source, but tl:dr one ChatGPT prompt uses ~3watts including the training.
10min of 4k video streaming uses significantly more than a lot of prompts
But most people don’t stream in 4k
Maybe not, but streaming an hour of 1080p also uses a lot of resources compared to AI
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And yet somehow bombs seem to grow on trees in the US and UK for dropping on innocent children by the IDF in Gaza.
This ad was a waste of the energy it took to print.
If the internet is demonised with enough propaganda about it being full of porn and bad for the environment, while steadily becoming more and more difficult to access, then the British public will stop knowing about the atrocities Kid Starver is spending their tax money on.
Protesting anything the government disaproves of is a criminal offense and journalists have already been imprisoned over reporting too accurately on the Palestinian genocide.
I get the feeling the internet sanctions and propaganda will just keep coming now till the government can control the narrative and we will always have been at war with East Asia.
Individualistic solutions to systemic problems have zero chance of working.
they 100% work.
that’s why they do it.
they make sure to shift the blame, to make sure the system remains unchanged and people who are profiting from what is basically omniside keep profiting from killing the planet and everyone in it.
They don’t work though, they just convince people it does.
you missed my point.
it works because the intended purpose is to shift blame and avoid any actual regulations/policies that will actually solve the problem.
they work because the intended purpose is to increase profits and fuck over everyone
The light that powers that sign likely uses more power than is going to be saved by people turning their screens off because of it
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one viral AI avatar or “Barbie Box” image can consume enough energy to fully charge an electric car several times.
A Model 3 battery is 200,000-300,000 kiloJoules.
Absolute worst case for an image, even taking very extreme estimates and amortizing out all the training, is like 30 kJ. Maybe 70 kJ for a slop video that takes under a minute to render, which is on the order of browsing Lemmy on a laptop for a bit. For reference, a local generation with FLUX dev on my 3090 is 2 kJ per image, and that’s relatively inefficient.
I’m just saying, that is a bad comparison, as EVs take an absolute truckload of electricity to run.
I don’t think anybody turns their phones on thinking “I wonder what halfbaked AI generated video i can watch now?”
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AI slop is a different topic.
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oh fuck off with that logic, a message needs a platform to be heard. Yelling at the top of your lungs about the axe-murderer isnt going to get you anywhere if you’re in his basement with the bodies. Get on his roof and yell
They could always use a poster…
“But the trees used to cut that poster and the glue used to put it up, along with the lighting needed to make it visible at a distance would incur unforgiveable costs on this planet…”
It IS a poster with a backlight that was already there.
This isn’t BP throwing out a million dollar PR campaign to improve their image after polluting the ocean, this is a university putting out a PSA to drum interest about sustainable ways of using our digital devices.
They printed a poster and rented an illuminated poster board that was already there to do so. It’s the same contradiction as using a diesel train to attend Friday for Future’s rally. Sometimes you have to just have to use the most practical medium to get your message out
What exactly is this PSA telling people? The message seems to just be “screens use electricity, and we’re doing vague sustainability research around that”.
I think this could have been a spam email and it would have achieved the same outcome. Not to mention that electricity is getting greener by the day, and personal device usage is such a small portion of electricity use it might as well be zero
Well I typed in the link to their page, and it’s… nothing. They’re literally not saying anything, just talking about some bs initatives with their corporate sponsors. Yes, fine, this is silly nonsense
This isn’t a worthwhile message.
Is that advert backlit ALL DAY?
Think. Think again.Think about industrial energy use and lack of government enforcing landlords to install insulation and solarEh, I can give a pass to this because even if it wasn’t this ad, another one would be in its place burning the same amount of energy.
If this university hadnt bought this meaningless advert it would have a tiny reduction in the demand for advertising potentially leading to less always lit billboards being made. So no, they dont get a pass for it.
I think a fairer argument is to see how many people actually reduced their screen time. Then, see if that offset the run time of this ad. In that case, this sign doesn’t get a pass because we all know the answer to that question.
Wouldn’t it still be more useful to display an ad criticizing this kind of 24/7 lit ad?
If you wanted my screen time to be more efficient, please explain all these JS and CSS frameworks you are requiring me to load.
Why not use AI as a example
What if its local ai?
Local AI probably uses more CO2 per prompt than datacenter, unless you’re running off your own solar panels or something
You really bit the AI phobia.
Even 1000 non-local AI prompts use about the same energy as your microwave.
Datacenters running AI are crunching billions of prompts a second.
Hang on those aren’t even equivalent units. Equivalent to running your microwave for how long?
That energy would be used anyway, on watching youtube
I am talking about Non Local ai here
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Data centers use massive amounts of power. Reducing that power consumption would be a net positive on the environment.
That said, looking at the site, I can’t see anything that suggests they’ve done any research into that. Instead they seem to be promoting their research into keeping kids safe online, with the only mention of the OSA being a short description in their recent June report with no comment about anything to do with it’s obvious shortcomings.
The climate after i send electromagnetic waves at 2.4 GHz frequency:
AI dataceter water cooling doesn’t grow on trees.
Your showers are hurting the profits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_Group
The uk government keeps giving them renewable energy subsidies because trees can regrow but ignore the fact that they cut down trees the other side of the world to burn them here. It releases all the carbon stored in the trees into the atmosphere and then they capture a small percentage of it back and pretend to be the good guys.
If my goal was to try and damage the organization of groups looking to drive environmental initiatives, this is what I’d do. One of the things, anyways.
It’s cheaper and easier to make people feel bad than it is to take reasonable steps to actually solve our environmental problems. Plus, this option lets you be smug and judgmental.
