One of the fundamental deceptions of AI is that it reduces work. It looks that way only because you receive the output through a very narrow aperture, creating the illusion of ease.
Anatomy of an AI System is a fantastic resource that strips away that illusion. The patient accumulation of detail exposes how “each small moment of convenience — be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song — requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data.”
One of the principal functions of consumer-grade AI is to shift the burden of all that work onto other people. It is an insidious technology precisely because it makes the end user complicit in vast externalities. For most operations, AI requires more work than simply doing the task yourself. By obscuring your view of that work, AI makes it Someone Else’s Problem.
That critically undermines “I only use it for small things” as a justification. It’s the accumulation of small things that makes some technologies so destructive. Cars wouldn’t do nearly so much structural and environmental harm if we only used them for the occasional long trip. It’s the multiple daily drives to points within walking, bicycle, or mass transit distance that have the biggest impact on our health and the shape of our communities.
Likewise, the accumulation of idle prompts, of small tasks, of tweaks and casual experiments and revisions offloaded to a process designed to shield you not just from the work involved but also from an awareness of the work involved — these all contribute to a burgeoning strain on communities both far away and closer to home than we sometimes suspect.