It's the design choices

Ketan Joshi analysed Google's latest sustainability report, which details enormous increases in energy consumption, which is not good news given we're in a climate crisis.

Adding up the numbers, Joshi says the increase isn't due to people manually prompting Gemini, but likely associated with the fact Google's search engine shows AI results by default:

GenAI’s climate harm comes from the system design, such as Google’s AI overview triggering constantly whether users want it or not

(From: Google’s exponential path to climate-wrecking digital bloat – Ketan Joshi)

They could choose to try and have the reverse effect, by designing it like the Spice Girls would: triggering GenAI-abled functionality only when users really, really want it.

Hidde de Vries (@hdv@front-end.social) is a web enthusiast from Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He currently works on accessibility standards for the Dutch government (views his own) and is in the W3C's AB. Previously, he worked for Mozilla, W3C/WAI, national and local governments, Sanoma Learning and others as a freelancer. Hidde is a public speaker (all 92 talks). In his free time, he works on a coffee table book covering the video conferencing apps of our decade.

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