r/sustainability • u/RicketyRidgeDweller • 7d ago

Use of generative AI in simple internet searches is far more energy intensive than the text extractive searches previously the norm.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-googles-ai-answers-cost-the-environment/

Everything matters when you consider sustainability and AI is no exception. This is just one more way people can judge me as crazy when I bring it up and ask people to consider their actions.

I’ve moved to a browser that doesn’t automatically search using generative AI.

80 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

9

u/alatare 5d ago

And Google Search has turned in on by default, with no intuitive way to turn it off

1

u/anickilee 2d ago

I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off even with directions (which didn’t 100% match what I was seeing). I thought I found the way but the next search still had AI on. I’d use Ecosia, but it crashes with the number of open tabs I use

1

u/robertDouglass 5d ago

Uh, no kidding?

-11

u/robertDouglass 5d ago

On the other hand, it usually takes 1 search instead of 5 and more than half the time I don't even go to the website in question. The future of "the internet" is interacting with LLMs using natural language. We need to focus on making that as efficient as possible.

10

u/RicketyRidgeDweller 5d ago

I get that argument, however when I’m just googling the hours of a local store I don’t need AI in on it. Being able to reserve it for more complex searches would target machine learning more efficiently from an energy standpoint. As for the quality of results I’m not at a point to trust AI responses. I’ve seen some weird answers. Heck, I always qualify my resources when researching. It also concerns me that it’s ‘dumbing’ down people. AI offers many of the same biases and fallacies of thought and action that humans fall victim to.

-1

u/robertDouglass 5d ago

for me, Google is not a good example of how to integrate AI into search. I'm much more fan of Perplexity and using web search within ChatGPT.

-17

u/BlueLobsterClub 5d ago

I use chat gpt often to get information (general stuff that im interested in, plant growing conditions etc) and i find it hard to believe it wastes more electricity than i would waste searching for that information for 5 minutes

People compare ai search to google search, when it should be ai to 16 google searches + the extended time your screen was on.

14

u/alatare 5d ago

This has nothing to do with electricity required to power your screen while you use the computer to find an answer. It's about what happens server-side, where all the heavy lifting is done. Your computer is simply receiving and displaying information, not processing it.

Standard Google Search: A typical Google search generates about 0.2g of CO2. A ChatGPT query is estimated to emit 4.32g of CO2

So based on these approximations, you'd do 21 Google searches before you emit as much as one ChatGPT search. Assuming ChatGPT gives you the right answer on the first go, which isn't always the case

-3

u/3pinephrin3 5d ago

Honestly that’s not as bad as I thought, 1 chatGPT search can definitely be better than 21 google searches. No reason to have it turned on for every google search though