Meanwhile…
Ipso facto, for all the AI “Akshually” pedants, I’ve tagged this as AIP. Politely go fuck yourselves :)
“Fork it, fix it or fuck it” - dealers choice :)
Got dunked on for AI slop despite explicitly marking which parts were AI-assisted
I get it - Lemmy hates AI in any capacity.
Hang on though; you’re glossing over a lot of salient context.
See: aussie.zone/post/37281785/25338365
That’s neither here nor there. Let’s talk turkey.
I think you’re finally getting to the realization: doing things without considering the moral or ethical implications is inherently, uhhh, immoral and unethical. Do you do more good than bad with your smartphone? Does it use thousands of watts (hours) every time you use it? Do you replace your phone every year with the new model, maximizing your environmental impact with the manufacturing? What do you think makes using a smartphone just as bad as using an LLM?
On an individual level I actually think it’s worse. A lot worse.
Smartphone (Ericsson LCA): 57 kg CO₂e (Carbon Dioxide Equivalent) total over 3-year lifetime. Manufacturing dominates. ericsson.com/…/life-cycle-assessment-of-a-smartph…
Smartphone (Carbon Trust): ~80% of footprint is production, embedded before you even turn it on. carbontrust.com/…/circular-economy-and-net-zero-h…
Meanwhile - LLM inference: 0.3–0.4 Wh per query (short), up to ~17 Wh for long reasoning runs. arxiv.org/html/2505.09598v1
Even at 500 AI-assisted coding sessions (heavy runs at that), I’m looking at 3–4 kg CO₂e. That’s 4–6% of a single smartphone’s manufacturing emissions.
So no, they’re not “just as bad.” Individual smartphone ownership is orders of magnitude worse environmentally than individual, occasional LLM use for a hobby project. And people typically replace their mobile phones every 2-3 years . Which means every ~3 yrs your phone adds ~60 kg CO₂e.
A good primer on the topic: blog.andymasley.com/…/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversat…