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.
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The king wants everyone to make a ghibly avatar and thank him for it.
And if you don’t find a way to integrate your fancy ghibli avatar routine into your daily water pumping for “efficiency”, you’ll get the dungeon.
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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.”
I honestly think that it’s really misplaced. Like, yes, AI is the reason e.g. RAM prices skyrocketed, but not by itself, it’s because of companies having gargantuan demand that’s higher than RAM companies can produce, so they crank up the prices to stop them. It’s just how economies in bubbles work. And AI is stealing people’s art not because it’s sentient and wants to harm humanity (yet 😶) but because it profits people that operate it. It’s just human greed, repackaged™.
I really liked this video about it by diinki, highly recommend watching it.
Also, just a little bit of nihilistic off-topic: don’t hate anything that bad. Like, I understand that it is really easy and reasonable to hate AI. But this is kinda too much, and it will devour you. Meditate kids. We know AI is bad, we don’t need you telling us that, go do things you actually like (and what I, as an average user may want to see e.g. in this community) instead of spreading hatered online.
why are you consuming water for your AI?
AI data centers use a fuckton of water. And before you say self host, this comic is directed at the other 99.9% of consumers.
Nice pre-counter on the shit ass argument of self hosting. Large scale is 100% of the problem
No I’m not understanding how it’s a problem. How does an AI datacenter “consume” water? Where does it go?
I understand they use water in a closed loop for cooling, but… that’s a closed loop. It isn’t consuming water. Where did you get the idea that it was?
Let’s start with this - where do you think the heat goes?
I think it goes into a pipe filled with a coolant that is circulated into a cooler medium like a lake or even just the air.
like a lake
what happens to water when it’s heated?
And when the heat is the same amount as a power plant or more? Do you know how those work?
That’s shifted from AI to data centers in general, and most of what they’re complaining about is the power generation. I live in Ontario, we get our electricity from nuclear and hydro.
Do you think that AI doesn’t use data centers? What do you think that the huge surge in building data centers is for?
Literally at the top of the article I linked:
With larger and new AI-focused data centers, water consumption is increasing alongside energy usage and carbon emissions.
Also from the article:
A medium-sized data center can consume up to roughly 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling purposes, equivalent to the annual water usage of approximately 1,000 households. Larger data centers can each “drink” up to 5 million gallons per day, or about 1.8 billion annually, usage equivalent to a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.
And worse:
Data center water usage closely parallels energy usage and carbon emissions. As data centers use more energy for their typical data center operations and to meet AI requests, they consume larger amounts of water to cool their processor chips, so as to avoid overheating and potential damage. Similarly, as energy use increases in data centers, so do carbon emissions.
So, no, it’s very much not only about the power for the data centers, although that is one component. And it’s fantastic that you live in an area with renewable hydro power, but that doesn’t help data centers built in areas that aren’t served by renewables.
Not sure if you’re serious, but cooling down servers consumes water.
Why does it consume water? Isn’t it in a closed loop?
It would be, if AI companies cared at all about anything but their wallet.
They also use a fuckton of electricity, many sources of electricity consume water.
They also require a fuckton of electronics, which require water to be manufactured.
I’m still not understanding how this is a water problem. Even in an open loop system, where do you think the water goes?
The same place where every other form of water consumption goes: to the water cycle.
If your argument is “that evaporated water will just rain again” then you’re arguing that water consumption is not real, and people should not care about wasting water.
That is not true. Most of the water of the water cycle is in the ocean. When you consume water, you are turning 100% high value fresh water into mostly low value salt water.
I’ve yet to see any actual evidence that any significant number of people are using evaporative cooling, and not just what everyone else uses when liquid cooling electronics - a closed loop.
Here’s a report by the UK government. Page 4 contains basically the same thing as I said. Which sources if you wanna go deeper:
