Yeah we do, it's basic epistemic hygiene. If you don't freak out about running your shower or microwave for a couple seconds or driving a few hundred feet you shouldn't be concerned about prompting an AI.

Apologizing for AI boiling the oceans sounds like a lot of whataboutism.

I can picture an Elizabeth Holmesian cartoon clutching her diamond necklace.

"Oh, won't somebody think of the tech billionaires?!"

If you don't freak out about running your shower or microwave for a couple seconds or driving a few hundred feet

The basic premise of the modern tech industry is scale. It's not one person running a microwave for a couple of seconds, it's a few billion people running a microwave for the equivalent of decades.

In a way the whole AI hand wringing is already the ultimate whataboutism. We’ve had irrefutable evidence of human caused climate change for over a decade at least, with dire consequences. And? Very little action. In fact, we’re now going backwards. The right way to look at this is comprehensively, not looking only at one issue.

So yes let’s hand wring over AI and continue to do nothing about everything else. And we’ll probably do nothing about AI either, but the endless articles will no doubt keep people distracted.

Except we do care about those things. We used to get tons of PSAs for carbon footprint. Turn off the lights when you leave a room, turn off your computer overnight, turn off the faucet when you're washing your hands. That type of thing.

Lol If we do care about those things why did the PSAs stop? Problem solved?

> If we do care about those things why did the PSAs stop?

Political lobbying.

> Except we do care about those things. We used to get tons of PSAs for carbon footprint. Turn off the lights when you leave a room, turn off your computer overnight, turn off the faucet when you're washing your hands. That type of thing.

“We care”. Because British Petroleum told us to care.[1] Now the new scapegoat grift is how many prompts you use to make your “creative” wedding invitations. Nevermind industrial use though. We’ll just hammer every little API or just endpoint, slurp up the data, then do the same thing tomorrow because why cache? Keep it simple. It’s not our cost.[2] No one will scold us (that can get to us).

Public service announcement huh. Let’s just fall for it again.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44046315

[2] https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...

Its just dumb to only care about energy when it comes to this very specific use case, while freely buying cheap plastic bullshit that was literally shipped from the other side of the planet.