Ongoing History Daily: Another hazard of AI
No matter what you may hope, artificial intelligence is not going away. And while there are a lot of scary things about it, AI can be used as a tool when it comes to making music. But if you’re an AI user, here’s a request: Stop being polite to the chatbot because it wastes tremendous amounts of energy.
AI doesn’t work on word count. It counts tokens. In general, one token equals four characters of text. The more tokens you use—in other words, the more text you use in your prompt—the more data needs to be processed. If you use unnecessary words like “please” and “thank you,” you are burning energy.
According to UN research, an end to just 25% of politeness would save up to 100 gigawatts of electricity, which could otherwise be used to supply power to nearly 750,000 for a year.
