ChatGPTの使用は環境に悪影響を与えない

Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment Andy Masley Subscribe Sign in AI & the Environment Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment And a plea to think seriously about climate change without getting distracted Andy Masley Jan 13, 2025 555 145 86 Share I have a cheat sheet for this post summarizing the main points here . I’d actually recommend starting with that one! I have a post here on responses to critiques of these posts . Since publishing this post, newer estimates have come out that seem to show ChatGPT uses about 1/10th of the energy I assumed in this post . I can write an update later, but for now assume that it’s 10x as efficient as what I’ve written here. Contents Intro Why write this? How should we think about the ethics of emissions? Are LLMs useful? Main Argument Emissions The incredibly small scales involved in individual LLM use How many people are actually using ChatGPT (I address training in this section) Other online activities’ emissions Water use Why do LLMs use water? Where does it go after? How much water do LLMs use? Intro This post is about why it’s not bad for the environment if you or any number of people use ChatGPT , Claude , or other large language models (LLMs). You can use ChatGPT as much as you like without worrying that you’re doing any harm to the planet. Worrying about your personal use of ChatGPT is wasted time that you could spend on the serious problems of climate change instead. This post is not about the broader climate impacts of AI beyond chatbots, or about whether LLMs are unethical for other reasons ( copyright , hallucinations , risks from advanced AI , etc.). AI image generators use about the same energy as AI chatbots , so everything I say here about ChatGPT also applies to AI images. AI video generation specifically does seem to use a lot more energy , to the point that I wouldn’t use it for the environment. I explain that more here. My goal is to fairly and charitably address each common environmental criticism of ChatGPT that’s normally brought up. If you think I’m getting anything wrong I’d really appreciate you saying so, either in the comments or somewhere else I can read it! Subscribe Why write this? I don’t normally write simple debunking posts, but I talk and read about the debate around emissions caused by ChatGPT a lot and it’s completely clear to me that one side is getting it entirely wrong and spreading misleading ideas. These ideas have become so widespread that I run into them constantly, but I haven’t found a good summary explaining why they’re wrong, so I’m putting one together. At the last few parties I’ve been to I’ve offhandedly mentioned that I use ChatGPT, and at each one someone I don’t know has said something like “Ew… you use ChatGPT? Don’t you know how terrible that is for the planet? And it just produces slop.” I’ve also seen a lot of popular Twitter posts confidently announcing that it’s bad to use AI because it’s burning the planet. Common points made in these conversations and posts are: Each ChatGPT search emits 10 times as much as a Google search. A ChatGPT search uses 500 mL of water. ChatGPT as a whole emits as much as 20,000 US households per day. Training an AI model emits as much as 200 plane flights from New York to San Francisco. The one incorrect claim in this list is the 500 mL of water point. It’s a misunderstanding of an original report which said that 500 mL of water are used for every 20-50 ChatGPT prompts, not every prompt . Even that number is I think misleading ( explained here ) and the amount of water actually flowing in data centers is more like 500 mL of water per 300 searches. Every other claim in this list is true, but also paints a drastically inaccurate picture of the emissions produced by ChatGPT and other LLMs and how they compare to emissions from other everyday online activities. These are not minor errors. They fundamentally misunderstand energy use, and they risk distracting people who care about climate change. One of the most important shifts in talking about climate has been the collective realization that individual actions like recycling pale in comparison to the urgent need to transition the energy sector to clean energy. The current AI debate feels like we’ve forgotten that lesson. After years of progress in addressing systemic issues over personal lifestyle changes, it’s as if everyone suddenly started obsessing over whether the digital clocks in our bedrooms use too much energy and began condemning them as a major problem. Separately, LLMs have been an unbelievable life improvement for me . I’ve found that most people who haven’t actually played around with them much don’t know how powerful they’ve become or how useful they can be in your everyday life. They’re the first piece of new technology in a long time that I’ve become insistent that absolutely everyone try. If you’re not using them because you’re concerned about the environmental impact, I think that you’ve been misled into missing out on one of the most useful ( and scientifically interesting ) new technologies in my lifetime. If people in the climate movement stop using them they will miss out on a lot of value and ability to learn quickly. This would be a shame! On a meta level, there’s a background assumption about how one is supposed to think about climate change that I’ve become exhausted by, and that the AI emissions conversation is awash in. The bad assumption is: To think and behave well about the climate you need to identify a few bad individual actors/institutions and mostly hate them and not use their products. Do not worry about numbers or complex trade-offs or other aspects of your own lifestyle too much. Identify the bad guys and act accordingly. Climate change is too complex, important, and interesting as a problem to operate using this rule. When people complain to me about AI emissions I usually interpret them as saying “I’m a good person who has done my part and identified a bad guy. If you don’t hate the bad guy too, you’re suspicious.” This is a mind-killing way of thinking. I’m using this post partly to demonstrate how I’d prefer to think about climate instead: we coldly look at the numbers, institutions, and actors that we can actually collectively influence, and we respond based on where we will actually have the most positive effect on the future, not based on who we happen to be giving status to in the process. I’m not inclined to give status to AI companies. A lot of my job is making people worry more about AI in other areas . What I want is for people to actually react to the realities of climate change. My claim in this post is that if you’re worried at all about your own use of AI contributing to climate change, you have been tricked into constructing monsters in your head and you need to snap out of it. The climate situation is bad enough. Let’s not do this. How should we think about the ethics of emissions? Here are some assumptions that will guide the rest of this post: You are trying to reduce your individual emissions If you’re not trying to reduce your emissions, you’re not worried about the climate impact of individual LLM use anyway. I’ll assume that you are interested in reducing your emissions and will write about whether LLMs are acceptable to use. There’s a case to be made that people who care about climate change should spend much less time worrying about how to reduce their individual emissions and much more time thinking about how to bring about systematic change to make our energy systems better (the effects you as an individual can have on our energy system often completely dwarf the effects you can have via your individual consumption choices) but this is a topic for another post . The optimal amount of CO2 you emit is not zero Our energy system is so reliant on fossil fuels that individuals cannot eliminate all their personal emissions. Immediately stopping all global CO2 emissions would cause billions of deaths. We need to phase out emissions gradually by transitioning to clean energy and making trade-offs in energy use. If everyone concerned about climate change adopted a zero-emissions lifestyle today, many of them would die. The rest would lose access to most of modern society, leaving them powerless to influence energy systems. Climate deniers would take over society. Individual zero-emissions living isn’t feasible right now. In deciding what to cut, we need to factor in both how much an activity is emitting and how useful and beneficial the activity is to our lives. We should not cut an activity based solely on its emissions. The average children’s hospital emits more CO2 per day than the average cruise ship. If we followed the rule “Cut the highest emitters first” we’d prioritize cutting hospitals over cruise ships—which is clearly a bad idea. Reducing emissions requires weighing the value of something against its emissions, not blindly cutting based on CO2 output alone. We should ask questions like “Can we achieve the same outcome with lower emissions?” or “Is this activity necessary?” But the rule “Find the highest emitting thing in a group of activities and cut it” doesn’t work. In this post, I’ll compare LLM use to other activities and resources of similar usefulness. If you believe LLMs are entirely useless, then we should stop using them—but I’m convinced they are useful. Part of this post will explain why. It is extremely bad to distract the climate movement with debates about inconsequential levels of emissions If climate change is an emergency that requires lots of people working collectively to fix in limited time, we cannot afford to get distracted by focusing too much of our effort and thinking on extremely small levels of emissions. The climate movement has seen a lot of progress and success in shifting its focus away from individual actions like turning off lights when leaving a room to big systematic changes like building smart grid infrastructure or fundi