Someone else in the thread posted this article earlier.

https://nationalcentreforai.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/05/02/ar...

It seems video streaming, like Youtube which is owned by Google, uses much more energy than generative AI.

A topic for more in depth study to be sure. However:

1) video streaming has been around for a while and nobody, as far as I'm aware, has been talking about building multiple nuclear tractors to handle the energy needs

2) video needs a CPU and a hard drive. LLM needs a mountain of gpus.

3) I have concerns that the "national center for AI" might have some bias

I can find websites also talking about the earth being flat. I don't bother examining their contents because it just doesn't pass the smell test.

Although thanks for the challenge to my preexisting beliefs. I'll have to do some of my own calculations to see how things compare.

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squeaky-clean 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Those statistics include the viewing device in the energy usage for streaming energy usage, but not for GenAI. Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison.

The 0.077 kWh figure assumes 70% of users watching on a 50 inch TV. It goes down to 0.018 kWh if we assume 100% laptop viewing. And for cell phones the chart bar is so small I can't even click it to view the number.

	▲	lokar 9 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		And it’s fair assume much of the time watching streaming would instead have been spent on TV
	▲	easterncalculus 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Unless you're exclusively using ChatGPT without a screen it's not a fair comparison. Neither is comparing text output to streaming video

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ori_b 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is based on assuming 5 questions a day. YouTube would be very power efficient as well if people only watched 5 seconds of video a day.

How many tokens do you use a day?

	▲	moralestapia 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It would be less power efficient as some of the associated costs/resources happen per request and also benefit from scale.

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j0lol 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thankfully YouTube provides a lot more value to society than gen-AI.

	▲	Marha01 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is a subjective value judgement and many disagree.
	▲	victorbjorklund 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Doubtful. If you look at viewed content it’s probably 90% views from brainrot content.
	▲	moltopoco 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		To adults? Certainly. But keep in mind that many children are now growing up with this crap glued to their eyes from age 2: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=funny+3d+animal... (That's just one genre of brainrot I came across recently. I also had my front page flooded with monkey-themed AI slop because someone in my household watched animal documentaries. Thanks algorithm!)
	▲	bongodongobob 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not for me.

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oblio 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not just about per-unit resource usage, but also about the total resource usage. If GenAI doubles our global resource usage, that matters.

I doubt Youtube is running on as many data centers as all Google GenAI projects are running (with GenAI probably greatly outnumbering Youtube - and the trend is also not in favor of GenAI).

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cowl 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Videos produce benefits (arguably much less now with the AI generated spam) that are difficult to reproduce with other less energy hungry ways. compare this with this message that it would have cost nothing to a human to type instead of going through the inference of AI not only wasting energy for something that could have been accomplished much easier but removing also the essence of the activity. No-One was actually thankful for that thankyou message.