Summary: ChatGPT is extremly bad for the environment. If AI one day kills humanity, it will not be by Terminator robots as in the movies, but by wasteful technology such as ChatGPT that increases demand for heat-producing data centers and accelerates the climate catastrophe, which will be what kills us.
Arguing in favor of ChatGPT
I do recognize the uses of the Explain feature, which is driven by ChatGPT. If you can see ChatGPT for what it is (an unreliable source of information) and constantly remind yourself that you canāt blindly believe anything it says, then ChatGPT can be somewhat useful. Even in cases when the generated information is partly wrong, ChatGPT can at least point you in a direction. Whereas without ChatGPT you might not even have known what question to ask or for what to search, ChatGPT gives you at least something that you can now google or ask fellow language speakers in a forum such as ours.
Non-technical people canāt discern truth from bogus
The reality is, however, that a large number of people cannot see ChatGPT for what it is. The number of times I had to explain to non-technical peopleāon this forum aloneāthat something isnāt automatically true just because ChatGPT said it were, is sadly too high. But not everyone in the world can be a computer scientist, and thatās okay. The world we are given is the world weāll have to live in. Just as human fraudsters can tell you the craziest stories, machines can tell you bogus too. Computers have amazing capabilities that humans will never haveāwe humans shine in different areasābut that doesnāt make machines infallible. Some people seem to think that ācomputers are smarter than humans, therefore everything computers say is true.ā Which is of course not the case. The fact that some bogus was told by a machine rather than by a human makes the story no less bogus.
Even technical people canāt ā¦ which makes ChatGPT so dangerous
Even computer scientists fall into the trap of believing ChatGPT were sentient: a human person with real feelings and real intelligence. How can you blame the average, non-technical layperson then? Everyone of us knows at least one person who is full of shit but so unbelievably confident at it. ChatGPT is that person. It confidently presents you unreliable information that sometimes is correct. Even a blind hen sometimes finds a grain of corn, as the saying goes. But āsometimes being rightā is not particularly impressive for something that has ingested the entire internet and then some more data.
ChatGPT is not worth the environmental damages
As a computer scientist, I say that ChatGPT is not worth the cost. And by that I donāt mean monetary costs: the 20 bucks a month OpenAI charges. I speak of both the environmental and societal costs. ChatGPT and similar Large Language Models (LLM) are literally killing our planet and habitat without you knowing it. They require unimaginably large amounts of energyāgiven how many people use it by now; itās the fastest growing app in history, after allāChatGPT alone consumes more energy than entire nations. All the data centers we have in the worldāincluding those by Amazon, Google, Microsoftāno longer suffice to keep ChatGPT going. Greedy bankers want to build an unsustainably large number of additional data centers. The problem is: Building data centers requires steelā¦whose production causes lots of carbon emissions. Data centers produce lots of waste heat that needs to be (water) cooled. Cooling these massive data centers costs us our precious water while rivers dry up and leave people without drinking water. Powering data centers consumes lots of energy. More than we can produce in climate-friendly ways.
Itās not robots looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger that will kill us
When people think that AI will someday kill us, they think of intelligent robots that will develop consciousness and eradicate humanity. Thatās wrong. AI will instead kill us by way of the most powerful people in the world greedily pushing this incredibly wasteful technology that will boil our planet and us alive, and steal all our drinking water.
Scientific research found out that it took merely weeks for the environmental toll of using ChatGPT to surpass the toll of training it. And ChatGPT was trained on the entire internet, including Wikipedia, Reddit, basically all public information. And thousands of exploited workers working full-time to produce additional data for training ChatGPT that is not on the internet.
Asking Mike to remove ChatGPT from Clozemaster
Given the evidence of the harm that ChatGPT inflicts upon us (which is consistently underestimated by people who donāt know any better), I am increasingly convinced that Clozemaster should remove its Explain feature entirely. The superb forum and the community that Clozemaster has built will surely catch those people whoāve been (over)relying on ChatGPT thus far, and will make these users not notice any loss of quality once the Explain feature is gone. I donāt know if Iām alone with this view: I think that ethical behavior should be valued more than personal gains. Iām confident that many users will agree with me and understand the loss of this feature, given that some have even cancelled their Pro subscription citing ethical reasons. And Iām sure the rest can do their 5-minutes-per-day German lessons without ChatGPT to avoid being cooked alive in a few years.
I realize that this post will be unpopular with a large number of users who understand neither the mathematics nor the environmental/societal costs nor the exploitation nor the business practices behind ChatGPT, and only see someone asking to take something they like away from them.
Closing words
Iām curious to hear other usersā thoughts.
Thank you for reading,
a computer scientist who studied this AI stuff in university and spends large portions of his leisure time reading about this
Just like Facebook isnāt the internet, thereās more to AI than ChatGPT
P.S.: I have nothing against AI. You need to make the distinction between AI and LLMs (Large Language Models). Iām a fan of these hyper-realistic voices generated by AI. Iām not a fan of LLMs (ChatGPT) due to their inherent inefficiency (scanning the entire internet and still not being able to correctly answer how many times the letter ārā occurs in the word āstrawberryā; three times is the answer).