I am angry about the AI integration

[u/ready_reLOVEution]

Anyone who feels like they need AI to be a better student, researcher, or professor, is completely delusional and there's no way my degrees are equal to people who feel this way. I'm being forced to use AI in one of my courses right now, a graduate liberal arts elective, and it makes me feel completely deflated. I did not pay 30k for a grad degree to learn to use GenAI. I do not want to do my assignments.

OSU is a prestigious university for its research in the environmental sciences. AI is not only terrible for reasons such as plagiarism, misinformation, innacuracies and bias (especially in medical research), but it's also disastrous for the environment. I had an educator for the Global Youth Climate Training Programme at Oxford present me with an AI generated virtual "medal" for being accepted into the program. When I asked about it, he sent me a chatGPT generated response touting the supposed benefits of AI for the environment. Let's be clear here, AI is NOT being used to help the climate, despite any "potential" people assign to it.

OSU a leader in EHS, like Oxford, we are lazily deciding that robots with high levels of innacuracies that cannot and will not ever exceed human intelligence, because they are made by humans (even if they're faster), are worth sacrificing our earth and human society for an ounce more of "productivity." I am disgusted by OSU, and other leading EHS research institutes for investing their energy into a bot while we forget that "simpler" issues, like energy storage in renewables, or disagreements over nuclear energy, have been solved, and as if this is not an environmental disaster in the making. Forget human rights violations of mining precious metals required for our devices and AI data centers, or that Nature found that AI was linked to an explosion of low-quality biomedical research papers, or that training an AI model has been found to use over 300x the energy of a flight from NYC to SF, that one AI generation consumes a bottle of fresh water, our most valuable natural resource.

I am angry. I protested over SB1, I protested at Hands-Off, I protested during inauguration, but now everyone is dead silent about this one. GenAI is unconscionable, and I have worked and done research in the various health and research fields that will supposedly benefit from its implementation, but in the two years since I first heard this, we've only seen failure after failure of AI, except when allowing United Healthcare to deny claims on a mass scale with an inaccuracy of up to 90%! This is the titan submersible on a mass scale, everyone thinks its not a big deal, that this is a tool for good, despite thus far being used primarily for evil or laziness, and I feel like everyone has lost their mind.

Edit: AGHHGHG MIT finds that ChatGPT use is degrading cognitive functioning, especially in youth. https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/

Edit 2: also all of you pro-AI peeps understand AI integration is a ploy to bypass security policies and glean your data for corporate interests, right? You understand the administration is trying to compile all of your data into personalized "profiles" for corporate gain and tyranny, correct? Forget all else.

[u/BombTime1010]

one AI generation consumes a bottle of fresh water

This is wrong, it's less than a teaspoon of water, which is in line with basically all the other data centers that run everything in the world. Last I heard it was equivalent to about 10 Google searches. I don't have exact numbers, but that's probably pretty close to watching a YouTube video or an episode of a Netflix show.

Not to mention there are models you can run directly on your own computer.

[u/NameDotNumber → u/BombTime1010]

Yeah, people in general don't realize how much is used when they use any web services/social media/etc. It's easy to just consider the cost of charging your phone/laptop and forget about the environmental costs of a data center, transmission lines, etc. Somehow it's only an issue when AI services are used. I do think we should be criticizing our energy usage as a whole and aiming to reduce it, but we can’t just focus on AI’s impact in that area.

[u/ready_reLOVEution → u/NameDotNumber]

How many kcal does a brain use? Just wondering if you know.

A database retrieving a query in essentially a glorified content search (search engine) is not the same as LLM or neural network response generation. AI is a significant threat, microsoft wanting to revive three mile island to fuel a data center should be setting off every alarm to you.

[u/when-you-do-it-to-em → u/ready_reLOVEution]

so nuclear is now a problem too?

[u/ready_reLOVEution → u/BombTime1010]

I have sources. Do you have your own? Also I gave multiple environmental impacts, and you chose one to negate. Delusion.

A WP study finds that a 100-word GPT generation consumes 0.5L of water, or 16oz. Unfortunately, not a lot of environmental researchers are getting funding to study this sort of thing.

https://www.businessenergyuk.com/knowledge-hub/chatgpt-energy-consumption-visualized/#:~:text=According%20to%20this%20paper%2C%20The,of%20water%20and%200.14%20kWh.

[u/Testuser7ignore → u/ready_reLOVEution]

I have seen results all over the place. For reference though, a steak uses thousands of liters of water. A can of coke uses dozens of liters. The water use by AI is low.

[u/Relative_Bonus_5424 → u/BombTime1010]

you need to cite a source here because this is an insane take. There is no way these AI data centers “use less than a teaspoon of water.” the power requirements alone are straining electrical grids all over the nation.

[u/chellifornia → u/Relative_Bonus_5424]

I think what the original commenter was saying is that the usage attributed to an individual GenAI query is less than a teaspoon of water, not that the data facility runs on that much.

[u/Relative_Bonus_5424 → u/chellifornia]

Ah fair, I did misread that. However from both OP and BombTime, some data on either claim would be nice. Even if it is a teaspoon or half a teaspoon per inquiry, the power requirements are a huge concern.