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Comment by sharifhsn

4 days ago

I hope you feel the same way every time you eat beef.

Maybe I do, or maybe I am very selfish and I think that my palate is more important than cows? Or maybe cows wouldn't even exist at all without the cheeseburgers?

  • I think their point was that beef farming has an enormously negative environmental impact, and we in the west in fact do overconsume meat. Though I think their point was to use AI with impunity, when I think we should cut back on our meat consumption a lot.

    • Some quick napkin math: AI energy usage for a chat like that in the post (estimated ~100 Wh) is comparable to driving ~100m in the average car, making 1 of toast, or bring 1 liter of water to boiling.

      I’d wager the average American eats more than 20 dollars/month of meat overall, but let’s say they spend as much as an OpenAI subscription on beef. If you truly believe in free markets, then they have the same environmental impact. But which one has more externalities? Many supply chain analyses have been done, which you can look up. As one might expect, numbers don’t look good for beef.

    • If tokens and beef came from the same limited “credit pool”, I would for sure be vegan so I could work more tokens

Literal whataboutism

  • Exactly the same as pointing out that LLMs use energy. That whole conversation probably used as much energy as making a piece of toast.

  • No, there is nothing fallacious about accurately pointing out that someone is being inconsistent or irrational by caring about minor issues while ignoring larger issues of the same kind.