This seems to me like a very solid analysis of this issue. I might quibble with a minor point or two, but nothing that at all invalidates his argument. It’s nice to hear it coming from someone who obviously cares very much about the environment. For me it’s good to hear it coming from someone involved with effective altruism, because whatever your feelings about EA, they tend to be pretty careful about their data and their calculations.
Tl;dr: see the two graphs I included.
This post is about why it’s not bad for the environment if you or any number of people use ChatGPT, Claude, or other large language models (LLMs). You can use ChatGPT as much as you like without worrying that you’re doing any harm to the planet. Worrying about your personal use of ChatGPT is wasted time that you could spend on the serious problems of climate change instead.
This post is not about the broader climate impacts of AI beyond chatbots, or about whether LLMs are unethical for other reasons (copyright, hallucinations, risks from advanced AI, etc.). AI image generators use about the same energy as AI chatbots, so everything I say here about ChatGPT also applies to AI images.
My goal is to fairly and charitably address each common environmental criticism of ChatGPT that’s normally brought up. If you think I’m getting anything wrong I’d really appreciate you saying so, either in the comments or somewhere else I can read it!