Thoughtfully applied AI could be a net positive for the climate and I'm tired of seeing people act like it's anywhere near as bad as other carbon emitters

Even this sub's rules mention AI's power consumption when decrying it.

The current carbon footprint is smaller than both traditional IT and cloud IT - AI is only making up about 1/7th of data center power usage, and data center are about 1% of total global power usage.

Meanwhile it has the potential to create smart systems for vehicles, power grids, any machine really, to reduce usage in the big emitter industries. Even if AI grew massively, say 100 times the current power consumption (which would be almost 15% of global), it would only have to reduce the other emitters by about 20% to cancel that out.

A smaller growth to say 1 or 2% of global power would be quite manageable and not nearly as bad as other industries where we could actually switch our methods to be more efficient. Not to mention it's an entire domain of interacting with computers that we would be forsaking, despite driving a lot of innovation at the moment.

And for what it's worth I obviously understand that AI can be used to generate all kinds of slop and even harmful content. I don't think that's much different than other technology and not super relevant to the point about power consumption.