archive.is link to article from allabout.ai at www.allaboutai.com/resources/…/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.
Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel.
Submitted 5 weeks ago by Reygle@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
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.
magikmw@piefed.social 5 weeks ago
There's practical use for AI?
Reygle@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
My boss is also a fuckwit
GhostlyPixel@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I’ve mentioned it before but my boss’s boss said only 86% of employees use AI daily and it’s one of his annual goals to get that to 100%. He is obsessed.
ramble81@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
They’re salivating at the chance to reduce head count and still make money. Employees are by far the largest cost for any company. They hate paying it out when it could be for them.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
Replace your boss with it.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
You should correct their spelling of “bullshit”
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 5 weeks ago
OP, this statement is bullshit. you can do about 5 million requests for ONE flight.
i'm gonna quote my old post:
I had the discussion regarding generated CO2 a while ago here, and with the numbers my discussion partner gave me, the calculation said that the yearly usage of ChatGPT is appr. 0.0017% of our CO2 reduction during the covid lockdowns - chatbots are not what is kiling the climate. What IS killing the climate has not changed since the green movement started: cars, planes, construction (mainly concrete production) and meat.
The exact energy costs are not published, but 3Wh / request for ChatGPT-4 is the upper limit from what we know (and thats in line with the appr. power consumption on my graphics card when running an LLM). Since Google uses it for every search, they will probably have optimized for their use case, and some sources cite 0.3Wh/request for chatbots - it depends on what model you use. The training is a one-time cost, and for ChatGPT-4 it raises the maximum cost/request to 4Wh. That's nothing. The combined worldwide energy usage of ChatGPT is equivalent to about 20k American households. This is for one of the most downloaded apps on iPhone and Android - setting this in comparison with the massive usage makes clear that saving here is not effective for anyone interested in reducing climate impact, or you have to start scolding everyone who runs their microwave 10 seconds too long.
Even compared to other online activities that use data centers ChatGPT's power usage is small change. If you use ChatGPT instead of watching Netflix you actually safe energy!
Water is about the same, although the positioning of data centers in the US sucks. The used water doesn't disappear tho - it's mostly returned to the rivers or is evaporated. The water usage in the US is 58,000,000,000,000 gallons (220 Trillion Liters) of water per year. A ChatGPT request uses between 10-25ml of water for cooling. A Hamburger uses about 600 galleons of water. 2 Trillion Liters are lost due to aging infrastructure . If you want to reduce water usage, go vegan or fix water pipes.
Read up here !
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
If you want to look at it another way, if you assume every single square inch of silicon from TSMC is Nvidia server accelerators/AMD EPYCs, every single one running AI 24/7/365…
It’s not that much power, or water.
That’s unrealistic, of course, but its literally the max physical cap humanity can produce.
Reygle@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
If you only include chat bots, your numbers look good. Sadly reality isn’t in “chat bots”.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I’m not sure what you’re reference. Imagegen models are not much different, especially now that they’re going transformers/MoE. Video gen models are chunky, but more rarely used, and they’re usually much smaller parameter counts.
Basically anything else machine learning is an order of magnitude less energy, at least
lets_get_off_lemmy@reddthat.com 5 weeks ago
Could you explain further?
jokersteve@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
please elaborate?
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Your article doesn’t even claim that. Do you have any idea just how carbon intensive a flight is?
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
I imagine people making that claim accept air travel as useful and “AI”, really, all datacenters as not useful. I’ve had people tell me oh, air travel is more efficient per mile that road travel. But this ignores that people wouldn’t drive thousands of miles if it was not as easy as booking a flight.
MangoCats@feddit.it 5 weeks ago
300,000 liters of jet fuel to send one 747 across the Atlantic Ocean - one time.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu 5 weeks ago
For modern planes 70 - 90k liter… it’s bad enough, no need to exaggerate
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Or a LLM query?
vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
It’s so important to differentiate between commercial LLMs and AI as a general concept.
AndiHutch@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
It also pollutes the mind of ignorant people with misinformation. Not that that is anything new. But I do think objective truth is very important in a democratic society. It reminds me of that video that used to go around that showed Sinclair Broadcasting in like 20 some different ‘local’ broadcast news all repeating the same words verbatim. It ended with ‘This is extremely dangerous to our democracy’. With AI being added to all the search engines, it is really easy to look something and unknowingly get bombarded with false info pulled out of the dregs of internet. 90% of people don’t verify the answer to see if it is based in reality.
davidagain@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Yeah, AI is shit and a massive waste of energy, but it’s NOTHING compared to the energy usage of the airline industry.
Reygle@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
davidagain@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Just because something has a pretty infographic doesn’t make it true.
davidagain@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
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.
davidagain@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
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.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
That says national not global
Auth@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
both those numbers are insignificant.
rimu@piefed.social 5 weeks ago
The emoji usage, heading & bold text pattern makes me certain the article was written using AI.
blaue_Fledermaus@mstdn.io 5 weeks ago
Makes me wonder what they are doing to reach these figures.
Because I can run many models at home and it wouldn't require me to be pouring bottles of water on my PC, nor it would show on my electricity bill.Artisian@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Well, most of the carbon footprint for models is in training, which you probably don’t need to do at home.
That said, even with training they are not nearly our leading cause of pollution.
REDACTED@infosec.pub 5 weeks ago
Article says that training o4 required equalivent amount of energy compared to powering san francisco for 3 days
Flagstaff@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
Basically every tech company is using it… It’s millions of people, not just us…
very_well_lost@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Billions. Practically every Google search runs through Gemini now, and Google handles more search queries per day than there are humans on Earth.
FatCrab@slrpnk.net 5 weeks ago
Most of these figures are guesses along a spectrum of “educated” since many models, like ChatGPT, are effectively opaque to everyone and we have no idea what the current iteration architecture actually looks like. But MIT did do a very solid study not too long ago that looked at the energy cost for various queries for various architectures. Text queries for very large GPT models actually had a higher energy cost than image gen using a normal number of iterations for Stable Diffusion models actually, which is pretty crazy. Anyhow, you’re looking at per-query energy usage of like 15 seconds microwaving at full power to riding a bike a few blocks. When tallied over the immense number of queries being serviced, it does add up.
That all said, I think energy consumption is a silly thing to attack AI over. Modernize, modularize, and decentralize the grids and convert to non-GHG sources and it doesn’t matter–there are other concerns with AI that are far more pressing (like deskilling effects and inability to control mis- and disinformation).
jsomae@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
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.
boaratio@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
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.
jsomae@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
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.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 5 weeks ago
almonds have value, while data centers dont generate profit.
ReCursing@feddit.uk 5 weeks ago
It’s using energy, we need more renewables. That’s not a problem with AI. Direct your opprobrium where it belongs
melsaskca@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
I did some research and according to some AI’s this is true. According to some other AI’s this is false.
Reygle@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
“Dear expensive thing: Are you wasteful?”
melsaskca@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
“Uh…yes? Wait! No…”
MangoCats@feddit.it 5 weeks ago
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.
Deceptichum@quokk.au 5 weeks ago
Shame to see this clickbait blog misinfo here, but the anti-ai sloppers wont let that stop them.
Reygle@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Wth?
Deceptichum@quokk.au 5 weeks ago
It’s a shitty biased site with incorrect data, ironically what looks to have been written by an AI.
maccam912@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
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?
lime@feddit.nu 5 weeks ago
“using” water tends to mean that it needs to be processed to be usable again. you “use” water by drinking it, or showering, or boiling pasta too.
morto@piefed.social 5 weeks ago
if they take the water and doesn't return to the source: there will be less available water in the water body, and it can lead to scarcity. If they take it and return, but at a higher temperature, or along with pollutants, it can impact the life in the water body. If they treat the water before returning, to be closest to the original properties, there will be little impact, but it means using more energy and resources for the treatment
Flagstaff@programming.dev 5 weeks ago
I think the point is that it evaporates and may return as rain, which is overwhelmingly acid rain or filled with microplastics and needs to be cleaned or purified again.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 5 weeks ago
They need to use very pure water, and it evaporates completely, so it must be continually replenished.
Hackworth@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Need is a strong word. There are much more efficient ways to cool data centers. They’ve just chosen the most wasteful way because it’s the cheapest (for them).
Cricket@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
I kind of wondered the same thing in the past, but the other day I read an LA Times article that illustrated the extent of the problem of water loss (not particularly related to data centers although we know they contribute to it). The main problem with evaporating water seems to be that it was water that we could have used which ended up in the ocean instead.
latimes.com/…/global-drying-groundwater-depletion
I infer that evaporation is worse than flushing it down the drain, so to speak, because if it were flushed you would at least be able to treat and recover much of it using much less energy than recovering it from the ocean. So it sounds like evaporation is largely (but obviously not completely) a one-way street, especially in arid regions, since only a tiny portion of the evaporated water would come back there as rain.
fittedsyllabi@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
What is this masterpiece ? Pro-pornography subliminal propaganda ?
jordanlund@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
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
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
My peer used the newton for comp aci class notes.
Then she went on to mastermind the behaviour and tactics of Myth: The Fallen Lords.
It’s tenuous, but I say that’s causal.
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Well what you said is not true, but since you are so interested in this, why limit it to AI? Just quit using computers all together.
Reygle@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Very well thought out response. Will respond in kind.
HurrDeeeDurrr K
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
Thanks for clarifying. You made up statistics, your post is nonsense.
And you responded without any consideration that the consistent reliance on computers, in general, is using a HUGE amount of energy, AI or not, indicate that you simply want to chase windmills and not have a conversation. Well played.
HurrDeeeDurrrr indeed. Next time let the grown ups talk.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
What is not true?
NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip 5 weeks ago
They said that AI is polluting worse than global air travel. They are mixing up pollution vs energy used. If it was pollution global air travel creates 80 Million Tons of CO a month. All AI in use is 15 million tons a month. Global air travel is far more polluting.
As an aside, and this is crazy: there is a mention, in the article OP posted, that suggests that humans, are far worse than AI for CO creation depending on the task. Which I found surprising.
The data comes a paper in the journal Nature:
Our findings reveal that AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO2e per page of text generated compared to human writer, while AI illustration systems emit between 310 and 2900 times less CO2e per image than their human counterparts. Emissions analyses do not account for social impacts such as professional displacement, legality, and rebound effects. In addition, AI is not a substitute for all human tasks. Nevertheless, at present, the use of AI holds the potential to carry out several major activities at much lower emission levels than can humans.
Ok I honestly did not see that coming.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
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 that’s high pollution. Most of the pollution from data centers is not from AI, but other tech.
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.
REDACTED@infosec.pub 5 weeks ago
Bitcoin or crypto?
boovard@lemmy.world 5 weeks 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…
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 5 weeks ago
As soon as you see water consumption being called an issue you know it’s not to be taken seriously. Water doesn’t just disappear.
vane@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
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 ?
Bebopalouie@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
I stopped l, not that I used it that much, about 5 months ago.
melfie@lemy.lol 5 weeks ago
I have started using Copilot more lately, but I’ve also switched from plastic straws to paper, so I’m good, right?
HubertManne@piefed.social 5 weeks ago
This is my main issue with it. I think its useful enough but only if it uses about the same energy as you would use doing whatever without it. Most conversations I had with someone trying to convince me it does not use to much power end up being very much like crypto ones were it keeps on being apples to oranges and the energy consumption seems to much. Im hoping hardware can be made to get the power use lower the way graphics cards did. I want to see querying an llm using about the same as searching for the answer or lower.
lime@feddit.nu 5 weeks ago
idk if that’s the intended takeaway from those numbers.
according to the faa there are on average 5500 planes in the air every day, and while i couldn’t find an exact number there seem to be between 350 and 1 200 transatlantic flights every day, depending on season.
Artisian@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Thank you.
Idk if LLMs can tell which number is bigger. But we already knew humans can’t.
otp@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
Just goes to show that you don’t even need AI to spread misinformation! Haha
leftthegroup@lemmings.world 5 weeks ago
Yes, but there’s zero fucking actual benefit.
Seeing memes posted here that use AI while sitting on it is the most confusing thing to me.
Just… don’t use it, people. The hole burning in AI bros’ pockets will close up if you just stop making it profitable. Even the free ones are making money with ads. Don’t use it, even for a joke.
Grimy@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Image
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Frankly focusing on the carbon output of AI models is a red herring. It’s not a significant part of the problem and just makes people complacent in the form of feeling like we’ve achieved something if it succeeds. It’s not worse than stuff like video games
Focus on the actual negative effects of AI, but carbon intensity isn’t a major one
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 5 weeks ago
People like you wouldn’t have seen the benefit in cars vs horse and carriages, computers vs typewriters and books, or watches vs sundials.
I bet you think that the only thing AI is used for is ChatGPT style conversations too.
lime@feddit.nu 5 weeks ago
we do a lot of things for no benefit. video games, golf, horse racing, grilling… all those have far larger carbon footprints. as someone else said, focus on the actual negatives of generative ai, like the proven cognitive decline and loneliness.
MangoCats@feddit.it 5 weeks ago
“AI” and related tech does a lot of useful translation work. It translates speech to text, one language to another, maybe skilled people can do these jobs more elegantly and correctly, but certainly not more cheaply.
very_well_lost@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
ChatGPT has the most marketing, but it’s only part of the AI ecosystem… and honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if other AI products are bigger now. Practically every time someone does a Google search, Gemini AI spits out a summary whether you wanted it or not — and Google processes more than 8 billion search queries per day. That’s a lot of slop.
There are also more bespoke tools that are being pushed aggressively in enterprise. Microsoft’s Copilot is used extensively in tech for code generation and code reviews. Ditto for Claude Code. And believe me, tech companies are pushing this shit hard. I write code for a living, and the company I work for is so bullish on AI that they’ve mandated that us devs have to use it every day if we want to stay employed. They’re even tracking our usage to make sure we comply… and I know I’m not alone in my experience.
All of that combined probably still doesn’t reach the same level of CO² emissions as global air travel, but there are a lot more fish in this proverbial pond than just OpenAI, and when you add them all up, the numbers get big. AI usage is also rising much, much faster than air travel, so it’s really only a matter of time before it does cross that threshold.
lime@feddit.nu 5 weeks ago
they list the others in the article.