I must admit, I've been replying on LLMs quite a bit lately, and ChatGPT in particular. I've been using the latter as a partner for self-reflection for the day, and seeing what comes back. I find that the results tend to match a certain formula (warm acceptance without blame or censure, a kind acknowledgement of what I did right and a summary of the issues, unpacking the matter in detail, offering suggestions for improvement or growth, and a related inquiry for follow-up). It's hard to not be a little enamored of the allure of such a "dialogue".
I've also read a bit about the costs of energy and resources required to train and keep LLMs working. It's absolutely not trivial, and it seems like there's a lot of guesswork involved—nobody really knows exactly how expensive that running an AI server farm is, except perhaps for the services themselves—Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. The demands on the environment aren't trivial, apparently, and are indeed far greater than we can probably know.
Should we feel guilty about taking advantage of services that potentially exact a high environmental toll?
It seems like Google for one does not care about said toll—"AI overviews" are now built into its search engine, so it appears that every time we do a Google search, an LLM is activated in addition to the previous search engine. It seems like this is a bit too wasteful… isn't this more than doubling the environmental cost of our search queries? People are now just taking it for granted that AI results are part of a standard Google search. Yet I don't see an account by Google anywhere that explains what effect on energy usage and the environment such a change really makes.
As a Mac user, there may be ways to block AI overviews at the browser level, but that doesn't meet the desired goal of stopping Google's servers from serving up the AI overviews to me in the first place, saving the extra energy required to create and deliver them.
For my (very) small part, I've decided that I'm not going to put up with these AI overviews any more. Since I prefer to use Safari as my main browser (the time-old default), I've set my default browser on all my machines to DuckDuckGo, and further toggled AI summaries on DuckDuckGo to "off". The Android tablet uses Chrome, so that gets DuckDuckGo as the default as well.
Maybe all this won't save much, but it seems to be all I can do at the moment.