cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/37715538
As you can compute for yourself, AI datacenter water use is not a substantial environmental problem. This long read spells out the argument numerically.
If you'd like a science educator trying to make the headline claim digestible, see here
Expanding on this: Even if we take the absurd values of LLM growth from the industry, current and projected freshwater use of AI datacenters will still be small compared to other obviously wasteful uses. This is especially true if you restrict to inference, rather than training, resource use. Once a company has already trained one of these monster-models, using it to respond to a content-free work email, cheat on homework, lookup a recipe, or help you write a silly html web page is usually freshwater savings, because you shower and use the toilet surprisingly often compared to the cooling needs of a computer.
I will acknowledge the nuance I'm aware of:
- we don't know the specific tech of the newest models. It is theoretically possible they've made inference require burning several forests down. I think this is extremely unlikely, given how similar they behave to relatively benign mixture-of-experts models.
- some of the numbers in the linked long-read are based on old projections. I still think they were chosen generously, and I'm not aware of a serious discrepancy in favor of 'AI water use is a serious problem". Please do correct me if you have data.
- there is a difference between freshwater and potable water. Except that I can't find anyone who cares about this difference outside of one commenter. As I currently understand it, all freshwater can be made potable with relatively upfront investment.
(Please note this opinion is not about total energy use. Those concerns make much more sense to me.)
How does this make sense? It's not like the AI is using water instead of a human showering or using the toilet, it's happening in addition to the human usage. Having AI to help you cheat on your homework doesn't mean you're showering less... does it?
The human does indeed keep living, and they do other tasks in the meantime (usually). So the human can spend 4 gallons doing busywork and another 4 gallons going on a date, or 4.1 gallons doing busywork and going on a date with AI.
This is a false premise. No matter how much work AI ostensibly does / how much time it saves the human, the human still exists during that saved time, and is still doing other things and, most notably, are still consuming water during that time.
Excuse me, everyone knows you don't have to shower when you date an AI. It's the infinite water saving loophole.