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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Edit: I’ll admit that I overlooked the fact they do add conversations to training data but a single user is going to be weighted VERY low. Especially if their data looks like an outlier.
Seems pretty unlikely to me that you could really influence the model in a meaningful way like that.
Better off focusing on public/authoritative data that will get weighted a lot heavier.
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.
Actually, most ai companies train on your prompts, so that is how it works. Might not make it in until the next model though.
I’ll admit that I overlooked that but a single user is going to be weighted VERY low. Especially if their data looks like an outlier.
Seems pretty unlikely to me that you could really influence the model in a meaningful way like that.
Better off focusing on public/authoritative data that will get weighted a lot heavier.
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.
I’ve seen a ton of anti-AI articles that were written using AI.
They’ll ‘write’ anything that gets clicks, regardless of the subject.
I even saw anti-AI video essays on YouTube likely made mostly by AI.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
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
You found a greenwasher. There’s a lot of them.
Welcome to the platform for real humans instead of clankers
On a plane? Hmmm
We still meet for climate change conferences. Like, no one figured out zoom conferences and work from home.
I wonder what responses I get for saying this, but nowadays both (as in zoom conference vs in person conference) is possible and both has upsides and downsides.
Online conferences are great to just listen to a specific talk, but other than that in person conferences are just a nicer experience. You can more freely just chat with other scientists, often there is a social evening where you randomly meet people you may not have thought about contacting before.
Now, should you travel around the globe every year several times just for that? Probably not. But in some fields there is one big conference every other year and it hugely benefits you as a scientist to attend these. Sometimes that means travelling from Europe to Oceania.
I see some people already taking issue with it in the comments, but I have also been to conferences that helped create partnerships that would not have happened otherwise. I’m not trying to suggest it’s worth the emissions or anything, but I agree that being physically present is more conducive to making those connections.
I think a helpful thing would be if people stopped sending people that are just doing it to check it off a list and be done with it. The idea that attending a conference in and of itself is some kind of development is wrong, and people should only go if they’re actually interested in participating in the exchange of ideas.
People doing presentations almost invariably have a façade on and what they’re saying is either carefully vetted to avoid giving offense and/or is done with the purpose of projecting a very specific impression and/or generating a very specific response.
When it comes to making up your mind about somebody and their ideas, watching a presentation at a conference it’s just slightly better than watching a politican on TV, which is about the most staged, carefully managed image of a person you can get.
IMHO, even as difficult as it is for introverts, the best way to discover good people with open minds and interesting ideas is when casually chatting with other equally anonymous attendees and that’s not something possible via video-conference.
this made me realize I’ve only ever been to conferences (in either supply chain or data) because a job made me and I’ve only ever seen it as a chore. Even attending talks is only to be able to take notes, type notes and send them to colleagues as part of work.
I always see it as a chance to find a better position than what I’m currently in. When business people talk about networking, these conferences are where the initial contact happen.
I mean if it’s a pro-climate change conference, go right ahead. You’re backing the winning team anyway, so GG.
seems like every conference in the bay area, is large, and mostly about AI. other stem conference seem to have vanished from SF, replaced by AI slop companies.
Now I’m curious about what you’d think about VR conferences, wouldn’t something like that combine the benefits of both, a more personal remote experience without the need of transporting everyone to a center?
Now imagine trying to teach every 60 year old who is an expert in their field how to use VR. Or how to make them accessible to low vision/blind people, or people with motion sickness. Or even just making the equipment needed to attend available to every audience member.
Fun fact, we have a mixed reality (guided) tour of the city. People can borrow some 3D glasses and walk around and see how the streets looked in 1887. And I regularly see a lot of random 60yo people walk around like zombies with those glasses. So it’s obviously possible. Though I suspect there’s a difference between people who paid money for it / are willing. And people who have to do something (for work).
And it’s probably uncomfortable to wear them for extended time, like a 6h conference track.
How many people with those issues are traveling to this convention though? Besides motion sickness and physical disability, there’s not much limiting those who can already afford the travel and ticket cost as they could also afford a $300 VR headset. Or perhaps a better solution is that it could be done at the same time as the in person convention to grab a additional audience and to lessen the physical costs and load overall. Sorry if my rambling sounds dumb, it was just an idea I didn’t think fully through that I just thought talking out would give me better perspective on.
Adding greater possibility of virtual attendance could be a cool change assuming it is viable from a cost perspective
But folks who are not able to use VR in some way or another, be it disability or technological illiteracy, are still valuable parts of the conversation on climate change, so trying to do it all that way seems iffy to me
On the discussion more broadly, personally I find communication via video call about a million times harder than in person. I get that thats not the case for everyone but the communication is literally the entire point of having a conference like that. Trying to do it all over zoom seems like a good way to handicap thw effectiveness of conferences on a really important subject.
Maybe thats cause I have some auditory processing issues, maybe its because of social anxiety or neurodivergence and feeling dependent on lots of social information thats hard to read via video call to understand what people are communicating, but I think that kinda just adds to the accessibility being functionally important point, I imagine there are lots of neurodivergent folks in research. But maybe video calls are much easier for other people 🤷🏻♂️
And we still burn because we think it’s ok. We think there are exceptions. “Just a bit” x billions of people and voila! Here we are.
…even from the people who know better.
or better: proton meet conferences or jitsi conferences
And we still have trains and boats
Does the company you’re employed at always happily give you how many extra days you need to take a boat or to ride a train instead of taking a plane? Lucky you, I can promise you that’s not the case everywhere.
Like sure, you could insist on taking the cleanest transportation method available but that’s definitely putting yourself on the chopping block and while starving to death due to not having income definitely is very climate friendly overall (less humans = less negative impact on climate after all) I really hope you can see yourself why this isn’t actually a proper solution. Unless you want to see humanity go extinct but in that case might as well also continue the way we have so far.
Company decisions are made by employees. Definitely you should demand the option for sustainable travel.
But, yeah, it’s an easy argument. Trains have WiFi, so you can work while you’re moving without harming productivity
Corporations are notoriously democratic.
Trains have WiFi, so you can work while you’re moving without harming productivity
I can work just as well on a plane. I don’t need WiFi, a company laptop (which I do have) is all I need. Any and all files can be saved beforehand for offline access and then I just upload them once I do have WiFi or LAN available.
Yeah, and worsen the climate catastrophe
Seriously if the company I work for insists on me taking a plane to somewhere that’s 100% on them and not on me. Don’t try to make people responsible for decisions they have exactly zero say in. That just makes the average person completely shy away from even trying to make it better in situations where they have the ability to because why bother when you’re getting blamed anyways?
I had exactly one single plane trip in my entire life (going by life expectancy for my not-US country I’m about halfway through) that I wanted to do and that’s easily compensated by me not having kids while living in a western country. I don’t buy bottled water either and instead use exclusively water from my tap because it’s safe to drink and doesn’t need plastic bottles. I wear my clothes until they’re impossible to repair and once they reach that point I cut them up and use them to clean if the fabric allows it. I negotiated for more wfh days than the higher ups like to see in exchange for a slightly lower raise to cut down commute. I’m still trying to get my landlord to install an electric charger for cars so I can swap my car to an electric one, I even offered to pay that charger myself because no car is sadly no option. Especially not when with the current temperatures the biggest train company actually starts to DISCOURAGE people from using trains because the risk of getting a heat stroke is too high thanks to the air conditioning not being able to handle the current heat wave. Heck I could keep going with the things I do but this wall of text is already long enough. And unlike you I don’t shit on people who do not have a choice with things, because that’s just not a cool move and actually hinders any and all improvement.
I am guessing they paid for the wifi so they could use ChatGPT
I meant in terms of sustainability.
OP is so focused on AI that they didn’t even get that. It’s weird to be flying on a plane and concerned about the environmental impact of a single person using AI for (at least) a positive position.
Their is more irony in OPs own situation than there is in the person they were attempting to criticize.
I see why you’re concerned, but I had to travel across the country for a wedding. The travel was necessary. You are creating a false equivalency between my necessary travel schedule requiring my to fly only one time this year because of an obligation to a loved one, and the person’s entirely unnecessary, daily AI use that is a result of their own laziness. Hope this helps!
I would say that its mostly about the conference goer. We’re so used to the absurd level of waste of a flight, that we are bothered by the comparatively tiny waste of an AI query. Just like we’re bothered by avocados but not red meat.
plane heading towards sf, because sf mayor is quite specific person to feature. almost every tech conference if not 100% is all variation of different AI usage in SF.
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.
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.
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.
The only exception to the “backed by real science” in any writing/publication should be art (ie fiction books).
Reddit’s LLM powered filter (I am guessing Gemini) is interesting. I jokingly said to constantly bump your car into some else’s car just hard enough to leave a mark but not create serious damage. The trigger may have been my use of the phrase “love tap” as I was instantly dinged a 3 day “ban” for advocating physical violence against another human being.
Meanwhile with another service I posted a quote from a 19th century historical figure I hadn’t know was a socialist and mysteriously the quote disappeared after I clicked submit. I freely admit my grasp of “good” grammar and English may not be that secure, but I am confident the text was there, and then suddenly it was gone.
Can’t wait for them to field a question to clarify a point. :)
“Hold on, it is slow to respond today.”
On a plane.
