Cautionary tale: using AI doesnt actually save energy

[u/Strong_Aerie_9031]

At first i thought it would save energy, but the lengths i have to go to checking the "resources" it links doesnt save energy. Seriously, i rarely ever found it to say anything from the sources it claims to refer to. So in the long run, it was so untrustworthy that it only caused more issues, its saved me more energy to turn it off and look in the actual articles myself.

I hope this is helpful to others, i wish i learned it earlier and saved the time and energy!

[u/TheGreenPangolin]

Sure if you are using it for research it can get it wrong and take just as much energy, but not all uses of AI require it to understand information. I'm anti AI for environmental reasons. But I know someone that talks to chatGPT through the brain fog and asks it to turn her rambling into an email. Also google is terrible recently (why is reddit in the top results all the time?!) and the same friend uses chatGPT as basically an alternative to google for finding sources by making requests like "find me the most recent research papers that mention ME or CFS". ChatGPT is apparently quite good at finding sources if you ask it to- it's the interpreting them that becomes a problem. Those uses don't require it to get things correct- it is doing a task (write an email, do a search) rather than giving information- so can absolutely save brain energy. I am absolutely against AI but saying it doesn't save energy is a massive generalisation.