Internet user sparks outrage online with troubling screenshot of Google search: 'We are doomed'

Despite what the entirety of Silicon Valley will tell you these days, AI is not the savior of mankind.

There are many reasons why this is the case, but one of the most compelling reasons is also very clear. Simply put, artificial intelligence is not actually consistently intelligent, which can make its sudden, flagrant intrusions into so many aspects of daily life right now all the more annoying.

A recent Reddit post in the "Mildly Infuriating" community summarized these frustrations well, posting a screengrab of Google's AI-generated explanation of the phrase "couldn't have happened to a nicer guy," which, while understanding that the phrase is usually meant sarcastically, still goes on to interpret it in the polar opposite way than intended.

We could be here all day talking about why AI is seen as controversial, bad, or even outright evil. There are legal, moral, and existential questions at play here. But an underrated aspect of AI's current ubiquity is just how bad it is for the environment, particularly to train these systems up in the first place, only to get such an inconsistent experience with accuracy on the results.

To quote the UN Environment Programme, "The proliferating data centres that house AI servers produce electronic waste. They are large consumers of water, which is becoming scarce in many places. They rely on critical minerals and rare elements, which are often mined unsustainably. And they use massive amounts of electricity, spurring the emission of planet-warming greenhouse gases."

Research shows that a search on ChatGPT, the popular AI-based chatbot, consumes about five times as much electricity as a search on a non-AI website such as Google, and in the two-plus years since it has been publicly available, ChatGPT has rapidly become one of the most visited websites in the world.

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While these factors could improve, and while there are applications for AI that are much more worthwhile, that 5-to-1 ratio is either an unsustainable business model for AI corporations' bills or an unsettling recipe for an imminent energy crisis.

For these reasons, many people have switched their browser's default search engine to Ecosia, which uses a modified version of Bing and eliminates AI results — all while pledging 100% of its ad profits to plant trees.

Though many remain curious about AI and its possibilities, most of the Redditors here agreed with the original post's mild infuriation.

"Classic, it's like it takes the information out of the top 3 search results and organizes it into a misinformed summary that will steer you wrong 9 times out of 10," one user wrote.