this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
622 points (99.2% liked)
Fuck AI
6579 readers
2221 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't understand these lines of headline. Where is that much power being consumed? I can probably generate a second video on my phone in a few seconds, and I doubt it's using much more power than usual. Maybe the generation is happening elsewhere.
If you put a Kill-a-Watt on the power cable coming into your PC at home, will you see a huge spike on power consumption when you generate something?
The answer is in the article. Generation happens in gigantic data centers.
I find it unlikely that someone might be on Lemmy and not be aware about the basics of how ""AI"" actually works. But if you don't know, truly, the rundown is that all of these AI apps you use are just an interface where you can make a request to an ""AI"" do something. The ""AI"" is not running on your computer. It's like sending someone a message "hey, do this for me" and they will do it, and then saying you don't feel tired after doing it.
You can use a 15 year old pc or a top of the line gaming rig, then go to chatgpt website and request something, and the result would be the same, because it's not your machine doing the work.
Now, you can indeed run local AI on your machine, and if you try, you'd quickly see that you need beefy hardware and that your power use would spike like crazy to deliver results that are way slower than what you'd get from using an app/website. Which makes it obvious that they're using stronger (more) hardware than you are, and, therefore, using way more energy than you are.
That feels unnecessarily aggressive?
I don't really use it because I don't like it, so I haven't bothered to read much about it. I tried some local stable diffusion image generation and it didn't seem to strain my gaming computer much. I don't have a power measuring device.
I tried stuff like Claude which I know is running remotely, and I assumed Gemini is remote since Google wouldn't pass up a chance to exfiltrate more of my data.
what app are you using to generate video on your phone?
I tried a few different free apps rather than the official apps of one of the ai vendors. I guess I assumed that most of them were doing their thinking locally but I never tried on airplane mode.
I did caveat my top level comment.