Alt Text: The cartoon illustrates the problem of water use in the AI age: a farmer's child and his mother are pumping a little water from a well for their daily use. Two knights in armor, transporting a large, spherical water container on wheels, come by and say, "The King wishes to make more avatars of himself as a Ghibli character."
In the background, a castle sits enthroned on a hill. The cartoon illustrates the excessive water consumption required for AI model queries.
The king wants everyone to make a ghibly avatar and thank him for it.
this is just fucking rain world
Where was the outrage - and where IS it still - about PCs and circuit manufacturing that allowed the computing revolution to occur? The negative externalities have always been kids getting cancer, growing up scavenging metals from landfills in other countries. Whole generations of people.
Just about everything we do has negative externalities like that. Plastic recycling, textile production, the labor used to build houses and harvest crops in the US.
I'm not trying to tu quoque anyone here, because we should be able to criticize things even though we participate in those or other problematic issues. But it seems like the AI hatred is so strong on this site, and it's absent any other hatred and outrage that could have long been a focal point up until now. We get it, you hate AI, which has been around for a few years in LLM form and hasn't been perfected yet, even though consumer electronics companies have still not managed to meet their environmental goals after decades, and you're certainly using those devices to your hearts content.
Sometimes I think Lemmy should just be renamed "We fucking hate AI and will never budge on that."
why are you consuming water for your AI?
This is false. Used to be true, but nowadays the big AI companies use closed-loop water cooling systems. No evaporation.
The actual source is War and Peas. Hilarious webcomic. Support the artists if you can.
AI systems themselves don’t inherently require large amounts of water. The water use comes from data center cooling design choices. Closed-loop liquid cooling systems can minimize water consumption, and large bodies of water like lakes, rivers, or the sea can serve as effective heat sinks.
So, high water usage is not a technical necessity of AI. It's just cheaper and easier to ignore mother nature. Especially when you are in a race against the other AI companies.
If the US had not given up on saving the climate, laws for environmental protection could have helped.
I like this sentiment, but why are they queuing for the pump with a water jug already full with water?
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