archive.is link to article from allabout.ai at https://www.allaboutai.com/resources/ai-statistics/ai-environment/
Which is why I threw up in my mouth a little when my boss said we all need to be more bullish on AI this morning.
My boss is also a fuckwit
Same. And they basically jizz their pants when they see a practical use for AI, but 9 out of 10 times there’s already a cheaper and more reliable solution they won’t even entertain.
Replace your boss with it.
You should correct their spelling of “bullshit”
I’ve mentioned it before but my boss’s boss said only 86% of employees in his department use AI daily and it’s one of his annual goals to get that to 100%. He is obsessed.
Yeah, AI is shit and a massive waste of energy, but it’s NOTHING compared to the energy usage of the airline industry.
Friend, did you actually follow the link? Maybe just read the pictures?
Just because something has a pretty infographic doesn’t make it true.
Picked at random, It also claims this:
Why does nighttime AI use burn dirtier energy? Fossil fuel dominance: Coal and gas supply up to 90% of overnight electricity. Solar drop-off: Solar disappears after sunset, while wind delivers only ~30% capacity at night. Peak carbon hours: Between 2–4 AM, grid intensity rises to 450–650 gCO₂/kWh, compared to 200–300 gCO₂/kWh in the afternoon.
This is complete bullshit in the UK, where energy is greenest in the small hours of the night when demand is low and the wind turbines are still turning. Least green and most expensive is late afternoon and evening, when energy usage spikes.
Let me reiterate. AI is crap. AI is a massive waste of energy, but your website has its calculations off in terms of order of magnitude when it comes to comparing the airline industry pushing tons of metal fast and hard into and through the sky with AI pushing a bunch of electrons through a bunch of transistors. Seriously, way off.
I checked. The IEA says airlines generate about a gigaton of CO2, and it’s still growing since the dip of covid, which is perhaps where your infographic authors got their screwy figures, which are, like I suggested, the wrong order of magnitude.
Cite your source and compare also using your source?
https://lmgtfy2.com/query/?q=IEA
Like I said, the IEA. The International Energy Agency. I wonder if you’ve heard of them.You can throw scepticism as much as you like, dude, but
(1) I did not lie and
(2) your website is unreliable. Give it up.Again. LLMs are crap, they spout falsehoods all the time, they use unreasonably large amounts of data, but the airline industry pollutes a LOT more.
I begin to wonder whether your website was itself written by an LLM.
That says national not global
both those numbers are insignificant.
What does it mean to consume water? Like it’s used to cool something and then put back in a river? Or it evaporates? It’s not like it can be used in some irrecoverable way right?
I think the point is that it evaporates and may return as rain, which is overwhelmingly acid rain or filled with microplastics or otherwise just gets dirty and needs to be cleaned or purified again.
I did some research and according to some AI’s this is true. According to some other AI’s this is false.
The statement strikes me as overblown extreme position staking.
I use AI in my work, not every day, not even every week, but once in a while I’ll run 20-30 queries in a multi-hour session. At the estimated 2Wh per query, that puts my long day of AI code work at 60Wh.
By comparison, driving an electric car consumes approximately 250Wh per mile. So… my evil day spent coding with AI has burned as much energy as a 1/4 mile of driving a relatively efficient car, something that happens every 15 seconds while cruising down the highway…
In other words, my conscience is clear about my personal AI energy usage, and my $20/month subscription fee would seem to amply pay for all the power consumed and then some.
Now, if you want to talk about the massive data mining operations taking place at global-multinational corporations, especially those trolling the internet to build population profiles for their own advantages and profit… that’s a very different scale than one person tapping away at a keyboard. Do they scale up to the same energy usage as the 12 million gallons of jet fuel burned hourly by the air travel (and cargo) industries? Probably not yet.
9.6kWh of energy in a gallon of jet fuel, so just jet fuel consumption is burning over 115 Gigawatts on average, 24-7-365.
I hope you recycle as well!
I hope your recycling is net carbon neutral as well. Example: how much CO2 is released by a recycling program which sends big diesel trucks all over the city to collect recyclables including cardboard, sorting that cardboard at a facility, shipping a small fraction of that to a pulp recycling facility and making recycled cardboard from the post-consumer captured pulp? Consider the alternative to be: torching the cardboard at the endpoint of use - direct conversion to CO2 without the additional steps.
Don’t forget: new from pulpwood cardboard also is contributing to (temporary) carbon capture by growing the pulpwood trees which also provides groundwater recharge and wildlife habitat on the pulpwood tree farms - instead of the pavement, concrete, steel, electricity and fuel consumption of the recycling process.
“Dear expensive thing: Are you wasteful?”
“Uh…yes? Wait! No…”
But remember, one almond uses at least as much water as two requests to ChatGPT (sources: almonds, queries, data centers), so if you’re eating almonds at all then you’re being inconsistent.
I appreciate you sharing sources for that. I know almond use a lot of water. But one of the things you mentioned is food, and the other is a liar.
that’s very pragmatic, but you can also flip this around – almonds are a luxury compared to other more practical foods, whereas LLMs can help a coder net an income if used properly. I don’t think you can justify almonds if you’re going to claim AI usage is unethical on purely environmental grounds. And dairy milk is twice as much as almond milk in terms of water, so if you have dairy in your diet, cutting that out is going to be a lot more effective for reducing your water footprint than not using LLMs.
Anyway, check out the third link for more info on the total water usage of data centers; it doesn’t really add up to much compared to much larger things like golf courses. I don’t get why anyone would use water usage as a reason to agitate against AI for given that there are so many worse problems AI is causing.
I stopped l, not that I used it that much, about 5 months ago.
Barely ever used it just for that reason and the fact that the algorithms are getting worse by the day. But now my work is forcing us to use it. To increase productivity you see…
I wonder how one gets banned from using these tools without just spraying non stop paste’s of expletives in to the chat box
From this page it turns out that every prompt is one glass of water. Is there any chance we run out of water at this point ?
There have been reports of AI data centers further draining water reserves in areas of non abundant nor sufficiently recovering water. Which has not only environment but social and human consequences in the area.
What is this masterpiece ? Pro-pornography subliminal propaganda ?
Generating bullshit that isn’t really that useful.
Remember when the Apple Newton “revolutionized” computing with handwriting recognition?
No, of course not, because the whole thing sucked and vanished outside of old Doonesbury cartoons. LOL
My peer used the newton for comp sci class notes. Daily. Exclusively.
Then she went on to mastermind the behaviour and tactics of Myth: The Fallen Lords.
It’s tenuous, but I say that’s causal.
A lot of these studies they list are already years outdated and irrelevant. The models are much more efficient now, and it’s mainly the Musk owned AI data centers that are high pollution. Most of the pollution from the majority of data centers is not from AI, but other use.
The old room-sized ENIAC computers used 150-200 kW of power, and couldn’t do even a fraction of what your smart phone can do. The anti-AI people are taking advantage of most people’s ignorance, intentionally using outdated studies, and implying that the power usage will continue to grow- when in fact it has already shrunk dramatically.
A Phone can’t do anything. It can send/receive and the datacenter does the work. Surely everyone understands this.
A modern AI data center have already shot right past 200 Terrawatt hours and are on track to double again in the next two years.
People can’t be this blind.
A phone can do a lot. Much much more than ENIAC era supercomputer (I think you’ll have to get pretty close to the end of the previous century to find a supercomputer more powerful than a modern smartphone)
What a phone can’t do is run an LLM. Even powerful gaming PCs are struggling with that - they can only run the less powerful models and queries that’d feel instant on service-based LLMs would take minutes - or at least tens of seconds - on a single consumer GPU. Phones certainly can’t handle that, but that doesn’t mean that “cant’ do anything”.
I’ve run small models (a few Gb in size) on my steam deck. It gives reasonably fast responses (faster than a person would type).
I know that they’re far from state-of-the art, but they do work and I know that the Steam Deck is not going to be using much power.
LoL. Guess I can just get rid of phone’s processor then, huh?
And again, you link an image from an outdated study. Because the new data shows the use declining, so it wouldn’t help your fear mongering.
Reality is “fear mongering” is it? I agree.
If it were reality, you’d have some recent data. Might as well make projections on computer power use by starting with the ENIAC, and then you can claim computers are consuming more than our current energy output.
