this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. (www.thatprivacyguy.com)
submitted 1 week ago by sanitation@lemmy.radio to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] ReCursing@feddit.uk 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The article, as usual, makes no comparison to the environmental impact of companies like McDonalds (who use PER DAY what every AI data centre combined in the world uses PER YEAR, not companies like Shell or BP who are orders of magnitude worse than that. This is the usual anti-ai fear-mongering bollocks.

Should Google have installed it unasked? No, that's bullshit, possibly illegal bullshit but honestly considering how disingenuous the environmental impact is I can't trust the legal stuff that I don't know about either. But it is not an environmental catastrophe as whoever wrote this article would like you to believe for some reason.

Honest question: why are the haters pushing their nonsense? What do they have to gain?

edit: As usually the haters and useful idiots provide nonsense counterpoints and downvote because they don't have laugh reacts to demonstrate their groupthink and wilful ignorance. I really wish they'd all shut the hell up, they're annoying!

[–] cley_faye@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oh, some whataboutism. Great.

Also great to know you don't have to pay to get storage in your devices, otherwise you'd be quite unhappy to see it taken out of your control for no feature (Chrome still relies on cloud services for most AI features).

[–] ReCursing@feddit.uk 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't even know what you're getting at here. You claim my comment, which points out how disingenuous the article is, is whataboutism, then provide some whataboutism.

[–] cley_faye@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Article talk about pushing a large model on people's computer. You minimize this by going about McDonalds, Shell, BP. Do you even know what "whataboutism" mean? Your first sentence is "what about McDonald, Shell, BP".

[–] ReCursing@feddit.uk -1 points 1 week ago

I'm calling out how stupidly and obviously disingenuous the article is. That's not whataboutism. Do you know what disingenuous means? The article claims it has a huge environmental impact. It doesn't.

[–] Jack@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Remove and prevent 4 GB Gemini nano install into Chrome, on Windows 11:

  1. Start
  2. regedit
  3. Backup registry by exporting it
  4. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies
  5. right-click Policies, New, Key
  6. Google
  7. right-click Google, New, Key
  8. Chrome
  9. right-click Chrome, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value
  10. GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings
  11. right-click newly created key, Modify
  12. set value to 1
  13. OK
  14. Restart computer. https://pureinfotech.com/stop-chrome-gemini-nano-download-windows-11/

Or, you know don't install software from companies owned and operated by psychopaths, like Google and Microsoft.

[–] rbos@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

"Linux is hard" but godawful reg key hacks are fiiiiine, eh.