The 2025 version of "Please consider this environment before printing this email" should be "Please consider this environment before using A.I. to respond to this email"

🏞 Please consider the environment before issuing a return-to-office mandate

This is the right response - RTO is much worse for the climate than GenAI.
- So I'm not saying RTO is worse than AI or vice versa. But do you have any data to back up that statement. I've been seeing nothing but news about AI data centers being an absolute nightmare for the planet. And even more so when corrupt politicians let then be built in places that already have trouble with maintaining normal water levels.
  I get both are bad for the environment.
  Editie: thanks for all the sources everyone. TIL
This! There are no reason go back to office for some professions like programmers, managers, etc

Ooooh, I'm totally adding that to my email signature.

Aaaaaaand done.

If you don't mind the additional real estate, it would also be great to have a version where "printing" is still there but struck out, for people who aren't aware of the original.
- Had to shrink the font a bit; looks better all on one line.
o7
- Is that good? I'm old and have no idea what that means.😆

To be fair they never cared about environment. A paper is something easy to recycle and certainly not the most polluting material to produce.

It was more about saving money, greenwashing and pushing a conversion towards digital archiving (which is much more efficient that paper)

I don't think regular people really understand the power needed for AI. It's often taught that we just have it. But not where it comes from.

True, but most people don't realise how little not printing an email 'helped' the environment.
- It would have been significant if a lot of people did it.
People keep telling us that ai energy use is very low, but at the same time, companies keep building more and more giant power hungry datacenters. Something simply doesn't add up.
Sure, a small local model can generate text at low power usage, but how useful will that text be, and how many people will actually use it? What I see is people constantly moving to the newest, greatest model, and using it for more and more things, processing more and more tokens. Always more and more.
- Each datacenter is set to handle millions of users, so it concentrates all the little requests into very few physical locations.
  The tech industry further amplifies things with ambient LLM invocation. You do a random google search, it implicitly does an LLM unasked. When a user is using an LLM enabled code editor, it's making LLM requests every few seconds of typing to drive the autocomplete suggestions. Often it has to submit a new LLM request before the old one even completed because the user typed more while the LLM was chewing on the previous input.
  So each LLM invocation may be reasonable, but they are being concentrated impact wise into very few places and invocations are amplified by tech industry being overly aggressive about overuse for the sake of 'ambient magic.
I wonder how the power usage of running an LLM locally compares to playing a modern game at high settings. Can they be very different?
- I would compare LLM to bit mining. But I'm not an expert
I don't think regular people really understand how little 3W per request is. It's the energy you take up by eating 3kcal. Or what your WiFi router uses in half an hour. Or your clothes dryer in 5 seconds.

WHO IS USING AI TO RESPOND TO EMAILS? Like, by the time to "craft" the ultimate response, you could have just written the email.

This may be my bias as an engineer (not software, but chemical), there's not really much faffing about in an email. You just politely respond, or politely make a query. It's not very long, typically, and even if it is, an LLM isn't gonna help you.

You don't have to sugar coat anything unless there's some fuck up you're trying to soften. You just go "Hi xyz, could you please clarify when the design temperature is changing here?".

Wtf is there you can use an LLM for in an email?

I have only used it for software troubleshooting, as it's quite nifty there, even if it's information is out of date, it gets versions confused, etc, still gets me out of a bind or spits out random ideas to try.

But emails? Those short form messages, just barely longer than texts?

Are we actually serious? It's not a report

Please consider the environment before sending me an email, seriously, I won't read it.

Text generation uses hardly any energy at all, though. Most phones do it locally these days. In fact, it likely takes less energy to generate an email in 5 seconds than it would take for you to type it out manually in 5 minutes with the screen on the whole time.

Stop it, you guys.

“If everyone is littering, it’s not a big deal if I throw the occasional can on the ground”
- I miss the days where climate activists didn't get distracted by small change like GenAI. The big ticket issues haven't changed since the beginning of the climate movement: Cars, Flights, Industry (mainly concrete), Meat and Heating/AC are what drives climate change - any movement that polices individual usage of negligible CO2 emission will fail because noone likes to be preached at.
- I mean, depends on the email. If you spend more time answering yourself than the AI would, you almost certainly emit more green house gasses, used more fresh water and electricity, and burned more calories. Depending on the email, you might have also decreased net happiness generally.
  Do we care about the environment or not? Please, oppose datacenters in desserts and stop farming alphalpha where water supplies are low. But your friend using AI to answer an email that could have been a google search is not the problem.
- More like, "If I focus on being an asshole to people throwing cans on the ground, I don't have to stop using my car"

I want to see the "cease and desist you may not use my facebook posts without my express permission" type footers but against AI to start showing up

This is the main reason I am reticent about using ai. I can get around its funtional limitations but I need to know they have brought the energy usage down.

It's not that bad when it's just you fucking around having it write fanfics instead of doing something more taxing, like playing an AAA video game or, idk, run a microwave or whatever it is normies do. Training a model is very taxing, but running them isn't and the opportunity cost might even be net positive if you tend to use your gpu a lot.
It becomes more of a problem when everyone is doing it when it's not needed, like reading and writing emails. There's no net positive, it's a very large scale usage, and brains are a hell of a lot more efficient at it. This use case has gotta be one of the dumbest imaginable, all while making people legitimately dumber using it over time.
- oh you are talking locally I think. I play games on my steamdeck as my laptop could not handle it at all.
You can run one on your PC locally so you know how much power it is consuming
- I already stress my laptop with what I do so I doubt I will do that anytime soon. I tend to use pretty old hardware though. 5 year plus. honestly closer to 10.
It's the same as playing a 3d game. It's a GPU or GPU equivalent doing the work. It doesn't matter if you are asking it to summarize an email or play Red Dead Redemption.
- I mean if every web search I do is like playing a 3d game then I will stick with web searches. 3d gaming is the most energy intensive thing I do on a computer.
How much further down than 3W/request can you go? i hope you don't let your microwave run 10 seconds longer than optimal, because that's exactly the amount of energy we are talking about. Or running a 5W nightlight for a bit over half an hour.
LLM and Image generation are not what kills the climate. What does are flights, cars, meat, and bad insulation of houses leading to high energy usage in winter. Even if we turned off all GenAI, it wouldn't even leave a dent compared to those behemoths.
- Where is this 3W from? W isn't even an energy unit, but a power unit.
- sorry. there were two conversations and Im getting confused. Are you talking local where I don't have the overhead? Or using them online where I am worried about the energy usage?

But it's everywhere now and it's almost impossible to use mainstream services without it being used. I can just go to Google anymore, type a search query and get a reply without AI bs being used. How long before it's baked into the GMail compose window and it doesn't without me wanting to.

Then we stop using it.
I think we need a Rule 34 of open-source programs:
Rule 34: If it exists, there is an open-source version of it
i) If no open-source version exists, it is currently being created
ii) If no open-source version is being created, you must create it yourself
Doesn't gmail already do this? I seem to remember there being 'suggested response' options before I turned it off in the settings that were definitely AI generated. That option being presented to me creeps me out because you can't know if what you're receiving was actually written by the person sending it.
Thanks. You reminded me to turn Gemini off. Did that once and it came back on.

I don't know if it would help, but you could also add links to articles about this. You could put hyperlinks behind numbers - like "[see 1, 2, 3, 4...]".

Here are some if you want to do this: https://www.wired.com/story/new-research-energy-electricity-artificial-intelligence-ai/

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/23/data-centers-powering-ai-could-use-more-electricity-than-entire-cities.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20240318115424/https://disconnect.blog/ai-is-fueling-a-data-center-boom/

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-is-revitalizing-the-fossil-fuels

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-ai-power-home-appliances/

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-centers-water-data/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/sep/15/data-center-gas-emissions-tech

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/23/arizona-data-centers-navajo-power-aps-srp/

Na, that's too useful the point is to be virtue signalling

you need to generate about 2 million emails (using qwen) for the carbon emission of one transatlantic flight, personal use is definitely not the power hungry shit you imagine

I think they're pointing out the 180-turn in so-called "priorities." Companies once claimed to want something done for the "sake of the environment," but now they have no problem using resource-intensive AI without any acknowledgement of how bad it is for the environment.
- Both things (avoiding LLM written mail and the paper printouts) are meaningless greenwashing gestures in comparison to - for example - the additional car use due to "return to office"-bullshit.
I am a small part of the problem, so I am not a problem.
- i don't know what amount of energy and water LLM's or image generation use, but you vastly overestimate it if you react like this.
  If you don't have your screen on power save after 15 seconds of non-use, rethink it - 8 minutes of screen time assuming a 30W monitor equals about 1 ChatGPT request, and that's including the training of the model and the production of the hardware it's running on.
  If it cost any real amount of money, don't you think that people would have to pay for that? ChatGPT has 400m users, and only 11m actually pay for it.
  E: Something else to set into relation: Charging your phone for about 40 minutes using slow charging (5W) is one request. Water use? 10-25ml water per request - a 500ml bottle lasts you 20-50 questions.
  Gaming? ChatGPT uses the energy of 20000 households (not bad for serving 400m users and around 1b requests/day). Fortnite alone uses more than 400000 households, and noone preaches into my ear to stop playing fortnite because it's bad for the climate. (and i don't play fortnite lol)
  I never had a car, i have flown 4 times in my life, i rarely eat meat. I can generate 10000 requests per day if i cared to and wouldn't have a chance reaching even the basic wastefulness that a american household is.
- This post linked elsewhere in the thread was pretty insightful.