We can care about two different things at once. I get what you're saying and your answer to ladios, but why is it always when someone says "hey maybe we shouldn't use this much water" the answer is "well, yeah, but now do this other thing that uses water that wasn't even mentioned, because clearly you only hold opinions on one thing at a time like an early IBM without floating point, checkmate atheists"
but in this case the amount of water that LLMs use is so vastly overstated (and actually hard to get data on) that it's a much more convincing argument to the layman to say anything else.
the arguments I get into with people about this topic is about the messaging being not effective.
the very basic idea of two things being bad at once seems to be lost on most people, i stopped eating red meat just recently AND i don't use LLMs.
thats good and all if you want to be the most moral man in the universe at all times but to the average person they see this:
- someone harasses them about using AI when they didnt know it was bad and they just thought it was neat
- they google the claims that the person brought up (water usage, electricity, etc) and see a bunch of conflicting data points that point in both directions
- they are now negatively polarized towards the opposite direction of what you want
there are very easy points that you can bring up such as "the impact of LLMs on specific town infrastructure in the USA, see memphis" that are basically bulletproof. its a waaaaay better argument that just saying "you've killed 3409243290492304 plants by generating that meme of benjamin netenyahu" to people who are genuinely just fascinated with the tech.
I think my thoughts are very easily summarized by this one video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y85nqc2zm7M (topics: water usage, do ethical llms exist?, are they actually useful?, harm reduction, etc)
I'd urge you to give it a listen but I know it's a hard ask because it's like an hour long but I think it's worth it. and in all good faith if you think it's a waste of time, fine, i'm not trying to argue that strongly so whatever
TLDR: i just really hate the water argument, that's it. move along with the rest of it
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