Some commenters already answered for me. To me there is no real use benefit. I am rather a simple user and it seems to take up space on the phone as well. I refuse to use iCloud so space is important to me since photography is what I do the most.

Also, I like researching things old school how I learned in college because I think it leads to unintended discoveries.

I do not trust the source you linked to. It is an organization buried under organizations for which I cannot seem to find their funding source after looking for a good 15 minutes this morning. It led me back to https://ev.org/ where I found out one guy used to work for "Bain and Company", a consulting firm, and was associated with FTX funding:

https://oxfordclarion.uk/wytham-abbey-and-the-end-of-the-eff...

Besides "Effective Altruism" makes no sense to me. Altruism is Altruism IMO.

Altruism: unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others

There is no way to be ineffective at altruism. The more you have to think about altruism the further you get from it.

But the organization stinks as some kind of tech propaganda arm to me.

Not sure why would one think that article is something other than distraction attempt. Because emissions are adding up.

I'm from country (in Europe) where CO2 emissions per capita [0] are 5.57 while number for USA is 14.3, so reading this sentence in that article: "The average American uses ~50,000 times as much water every day..." surly does not imply that one should use ChatGPT because it is nothing. If "average American" wants to decrease emissions then not using LLMs is just start.

[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

This isn’t about ChatGPT this is about Apple Intelligence which is an on-device low power ML system.

For me: unproven trust and no killer feature.

If I can't search my Apple Mail without AI, why would I trust AI?

> I totally understand why someone would refuse to use it due to environmental reasons

Huh. This one baffles me.

Energy use, presumably.

Of course, are those same users always running their screens super dim? Are they using pen + paper instead of typing whenever they can?

Consuming kilowatts is not intrinsically bad for the environment. If you are worried about the environmental impact of power generation, then advocate for cleaner generators.