Every time Gemini summarizes an email for you, a polar bear drowns.
Every time you use ChatGPT for advice, a penguin starves.
AI is killing our planet. The datacenters that house the machines behind those AI summaries, bad advice, and fake images, burn through an absurd amount of electricity and water every minute of every day. Your LED bulbs and low flow shower head aren’t even a drop in the ocean when AI datacenters are being built and used.
@mcnado a fridge (200-800W) eats more energy than inference of a 70B LLM model (100-400W). I don't know what things like ChatGPT eat, but a 70B model is more than enough for email summary (or translation from regular language into neurotypical language for email composition).
Where's the water thing coming from? I know that the logic behind burning the planet is the presumption that fossil fuels are an unchangeable fact of life and thus anything that eats electricity is responsible for pollution because things like nuclear reactors or renewable energy sources are not gonna replace fossil fuels, but where is the water thing coming from?
Is it construction costs for the pointless electricity eating concrete boxes (AI data centers)? Or what?
@tranquillity @mcnado most of the water problem I'm aware of is redirecting it for cooling and locals having higher water bills. Not here to support the contamination concern as I do t know if that one is as much a problem for data centers specifically. Just using up the water (and power and all the environmental effects of that).
@mcnado And meanwhile we still got orange Don Quixote tilting at windmills
Worst. Dystopian. Fiction. Evah.
@mcnado You have things backwards. The electricity used by the median Gemini query wouldn't power an incandescent light for even one minute.
If UK homes still used incandescents, we'd collectively use an extra 6-9TWh of electricity each year. That's about the same as all the UK's data centres put together (7.6 TWh in 2024).
I know it can sometimes feel like personal choices (LED lights, installing PV panels, reducing or eliminating meat consumption) don't make much difference, but if you focus on the right things, collectively we can make a whole industry's worth of difference.
@tuftyindigo @mcnado you're telling me that we all put in LED bulbs to save the collective environment and instead we got a bad sentence generator and the environment is the same?
Nah, a Gemini query is still much worse than Google query and half as accurate. We are killing ourselves for someone else's content theft.
@mcnado We already over pump water from the aquifer for crops. When AI data centers literally poison* the well and we have no water for growing food or drinking, we’ll all suffer.
* even when some water is returned to the environment or treatment facilities, what remains has concentrated impurities left behind after the pure water evaporates. Repeating that cycle continues to concentrate toxins and nitrates, etc.
@Asymmetricblue @mcnado
that's why we'll make the switch to watering crops with Brawndo!
