Seconded! A book club sounds really cool :D

Yeah, exactly. I have my news feeds curated to give me the information I need. But when I’m here I want to be talking about what we can do, getting inspired, making connections, not just getting more sad and more cynical

The thing is, it’s a lot easier to copy and paste a news article than it is to make a new post from scratch - I think people are posting other stuff, or at least I am, but it gets drowned out pretty fast. I wonder if we could have a separate community for news articles? Or a sticky post for sharing news articles? I think the news is super important but I also think part of creating a space for change means that we need to foster discussion rather than doomscrolling

I didn’t think about that… thank you!! I can definitely get my hands on an old cellphone.

Absolutely, yeah. There’s AI now that can detect cancer better than humans, I’m all for that. I try to remember to say “genAI” instead of just AI but I do often forget, thanks for the reminder!!

No, but it’s not the energy use I’m talking about (though I’ll do some research on video games now, there’s always more for me to learn!) - I’m referring to the water usage. The average ChatGPT session (with multiple queries) is the equivalent of destroying roughly a bottle of water. But if we are thinking about power, data centers also run diesel powered generators when there’s a high demand for queries which spew out pollution. And then its worth considering that each data center as a whole is pretty awful, and if there were less demand for them, i.e. people not using genAI, the CEOs would be motivated to make them less shitty… every query shows them that, yeah, this IS a great idea and they should build more data centers :/

I don’t mean to like make you feel bad for making a quick tl;dr using AI, it’s just that this is pretty important to me! We all have to pick and choose our battles, but of all the things we do in our day-to-day lives that impact the environment and the world around us, typing up our own summary instead of using AI seems like a really easy option to me.

Very true, but when it comes to something like ChatGPT (or Claude or whatever new AI assistant we have with a cutesy name), people need to understand that using these services is a bad thing, until things change

thank you for being honest about it but please remember that each and every AI query is absolutely devastating to the environment!! It’s pretty easy to just type up a quick summary (or let someone else do it) rather than do that damage

oooh very useful, thank you! I am hella broke (like rationing my SNAP money broke) but I’d quite like to get into this hobby

Unironically, reading this made me so inspired I got really emotional. An internet of the community for the community. This whole post is beautifully written <3

May this man rot in hell, and may people like him who are still around live in agony and loneliness.