Regardless of the scientific consensus, what’s the point? It sounds like all this will achieve is another annoying pop-up similar to the cookie popups that we get now due to the European law. It’s just a way to wave your hands and claim to be doing something without actually addressing any of the problems of social media.
I think this is a bad faith argument because it focuses specifically on chatgpt and how much resources it uses. The article itself even goes on to say that this is actually only 1-3% of total AI use.
People don’t give a shit about chatgpt specifically. When they complain about chatgpt they are using it as a surrogate for ai in general.
And yes, the amount of electricity from ai is quite significant. https://www.iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-drive-surging-electricity-demand-from-data-centres-while-offering-the-potential-to-transform-how-the-energy-sector-works
It projects that electricity demand from data centres worldwide is set to more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh), slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today. AI will be the most significant driver of this increase, with electricity demand from AI-optimised data centres projected to more than quadruple by 2030.
I’m not opposed to ai, I use a lot of AI tools locally on my own PC. I’m aware of how little electricity they consume when I am just using for a few minutes a day. But the problem is when it’s being crammed into EVERYTHING, I can’t just say I’m generating a few images per day or doing 5 LLM queries. Because it’s running on 100 Google searches that I perform, every website I visit will be using it for various purposes, applications I use will be implementing it for all kinds of things, shopping sites will be generating images of every product with me in the product image. AI is popping up everywhere, and the overall picture is that yes, this is contributing significantly to electricity demand, and the vast majority of that is not for developing new drugs, it’s for stupid shit like preventing me from clicking away from Google onto the website that they sourced an answer from.
I played PC games since the early 90s, so I am well familiar with how things used to be before steam. And it was fine. I was hesitant to use steam at first, because like you say, I simply didn’t understand the point of it. Sometime after Valve released the orange box, that ended up being the first thing I bought on steam. And back then, some of the first things that I noticed about it was the ease of installing games, and the friends list that let me talk to and play games with my friends. I ended up getting really into team fortress 2, largely because I could play with people I knew, and we could even chat outside the game easily. It was easy to buy other games that these same friends were playing, and then enjoy a different game with them.
I got used to steam and it began to feel convenient, and at the same time, physical media started dying off. Steam let me easily install and uninstall any of my games whenever I wanted. I didn’t have to keep track of any physical media. I don’t have any of my old PC games from the 90s anymore. I have no idea where there went or how I lost them. But they are just gone. However, I still have every game I’ve ever bought on steam.
I’m not a heavy gamer anymore. If I see something I want, it’s easy to just put it on my wishlist and wait until it goes on sale at a price I think is reasonable. If I feel bored, I might open up my full list of games and browse for something to install. My game saves get backed up to the cloud. My controllers just work. Everything related to the gaming experience is integrated into one place, and I like that, it makes it easy. And for the most part, steam kind of just stays out of my way.