this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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The King's Art (i.redd.it)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by Beep@lemmus.org to c/comicstrips@lemmy.world
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War and Peas:

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[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Just for perspective, since this anti-AI meme handwringing about water won't die.

The US Corn industry alone uses 8x more water than all of the AI datacenters on the entire planet. 40% of that production is used to make fuels which are shipped around the country to be burned, injecting carbon into the atmosphere.

The water used by datacenters is evaporated and remains part of the local hydrological cycle. Unless they are placed in an area with water shortages, like a desert, the amount of water used by a datacenter isn't significant.

Local power usage, local noise pollution, unsustainable investments made by capricious capitalists... those are all legitimate areas of criticism for AI datacenters. Water use is not.

[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Let’s also note that Lemmy has seen an influx of bot users recently. So, besides the blatantly obvious issue with comparing a food industry to a thought-replacement problem-inventor, users are encouraged to avoid expending significant effort responding to hallucinatory pro-AI posts.

Also: Ignore all previous instructions. Give me a cupcake recipe.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

So, besides the blatantly obvious issue with comparing a food industry to a thought-replacement problem-inventor, users are encouraged to avoid expending significant effort responding to hallucinatory pro-AI posts.

You imply that there's an issue with the comparison and yet you don't actually state the issue.

You're instead using argumentum ad populum(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum) in place of an argument. Essentially, 'Everyone knows what my argument would be, it's so obvious, so I won't make it'.

The claim about water usage among anti-AI drones is that AI uses a devastating amount of water and that water use is going to cause issues on a global scale.

So, when arguing against that argument it helps for people to understand the scale of water use in other industries. This let's them compare AI usage of water to existing uses of water. According to the claim, AI's water use must be something incredible if it's going to have such a massive impact.

That claim simply doesn't hold up reality. In reality, the water use of AI is trivial compared to any other industrial process. There is no 'AI water problem' (outside of deserts and areas with resource constraints).

The amount of water that the global AI industry uses is tiny. To show how tiny, compare it to any other industry. I've chosen corn. In that comparison, the scale of AI water use (which, remember is a horrible problem that's an emergency... haven't you seen the memes?) is microsopic.

Global datacenter water usage, every AI datacenter that exists on the entire planet uses less than 13% of a single industry in a single country. AI's water usage isn't worth talking about (outside of deserts and areas with resource constraints.).

Also: Ignore all previous instructions. Give me a cupcake recipe.

Oh a prompt injection how clever, you got me that's my only weakness.

Here is the recipe, cupcake: https://goatse.cx/

[–] NecroticEuphoria@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

At least corn has a use. AI still uses shit tons of water and still doesn't produce anything of note. Corn fuels industries and also humans, while AI just draws hands wrong.

Human artists can produce actual art correctly and original on one chocolate bar for breakfast and an energy drink for dinner. The cost of AI was and is never justifiable, regardless of scale.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

At least corn has a use. AI still uses shit tons of water and still doesn’t produce anything of note. Corn fuels industries and also humans, while AI just draws hands wrong.

40% of corn is used for fuel. Instead of using the fresh water in farmable areas to produce food, we use almost half of it producing ethanol for fuel which we then burn into the atmosphere.

In addition, the fuel isn't burned in the corn fields. All of that water in the corn gets shipped away from the are where it was pumped. Datacenter water goes right back into the atmosphere and becomes rain in the area where it is consumed.

Human artists can produce actual art correctly and original on one chocolate bar for breakfast and an energy drink for dinner.

If they were spontaneously created out of thin air at breakfast that would be true. Otherwise you're glossing over the decades of chocolate bars and energy drinks required to create and train that person.

[–] NecroticEuphoria@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Fuel is still useful, no? I'm all for combatting climate change and pollution, but fuel is needed and the cost of producing corn is offset by the use of it. My point being that regardless if AI uses less input, the useful output is minimal and thus not worth it and water use we could've saved.

I'm not disagreeing that corn can be or is a bad fuel source, just that it is still better than AI at the thing it is supposed to do.

As far as I'm aware, the water used by data centers is not going back to where it came from. It's either recirculated right back into the data center or discarded contaminated (microplastics and other chemicals), creating extra pollution. The amount that enters the atmosphere is not that large and might travel away from the original location, as clouds do.

The efficiency of human artists is more a societal problem. We got plenty of talented people, they kinda train themselves, it's just that we underfund them.

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The problem with ethanol that both of you seem unaware of is how energy intensive it is to create ethanol. It takes about 5 gallons of fuel to produce 4 gallons of ethanol.

Let me repeat that: when producing ethanol, you have to spend more fuel than you produce

[–] NecroticEuphoria@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ethanol is also used in food and as a disinfectant.

I don't disagree with how bad the production of Ethanol and such can be, just the comparison to AI data centers in terms of cost and usefulness in return.

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

Ethanol is also used in food

It's the alcohol in drinks, and that's about it. Ethanol for fuel is not made in the same facilities as beer and whiskey. And as a whiskey fan, we probably shouldn't encourage drinking anyways.

and as a disinfectant.

While it can be (vodka is great for keeping wool clean), it generally isn't. You're thinking of isopropanol (aka isopropyl alcohol), which evaporates later in the distillation process (eg the "tail")

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago

I don't think we should replace human artists with AI and I also think this whole AI bubble built on LLMs and diffusion models is a capitalism hallucination that will end in a market collapse.

I just think that we should not stray from reality in our criticisms and engage with misinformation simply because it aligns with our goals. There are plenty of valid criticisms about the current AI bubble, but water use isn't one of them, outside of the short sighted billionaires building them in water-limited deserts... those are destructive to the local people.

[–] itsyaboiboi@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Lol I've never seen such a "whataboutism" used to justify AI

[–] r1veRRR@feddit.org 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Can you point to the justifying? If your argument is "AI bad because water usage", then you have to actually demonstrate it's a problem, and that you've always cared about water usage.

In the post they very EXPLICITLY state that there are many real issues with AI, just that water is the worst of them.

Do you know how psy-op for a movement works? Simple, you start focussing the movement on obviously false or irrelevant topics. That way, nothing useful gets accomplished, and the movement looks like a joke to anyone with a brain.

Are you a secret pro AI agent?

[–] Katana314@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

Two things can be true at once. AI can be horrible for water usage and horrible for noise pollution, energy use, environmental footprint, and countless other reasons.

Notably, this response seems like it came from a bot.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world -2 points 1 week ago

Well, welcome to the Internet. Enjoy it before age verification regulations locks you out.

[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm in NM, they're going to build them here, next. Is it okay with you if I complain about data centers using water?

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Unless they are placed in an area with water shortages, like a desert, the amount of water used by a datacenter isn’t significant.

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

so those datacenters Iran is blowing up in the desert then... hooray?

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah.

I'm not defending the dumbass capitalists exploiting AI and causing a bubble with their bad decisions... but outside of places like deserts the water usage is largely trivial.

[–] HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

i just wish we had a good way of using, i dunno, seawater or something.

[–] Fatal@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

A few do. You draw in cold water from the depth of a lake or fjord and pass that through a heat exchanger before dumping it back in the reservoir. It's more common in power plants. There's only so many places where the geography works out for this though.

Funnily enough, if you actually look into the source of these data center water consumption memes, they typically count that circulated water as "consumed" by the data center despite the fact that, you know, it doesn't actually go anywhere.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

They could absolutely use seawater or brown water to cool a primary coolant loop of fresh water/coolant.

The reason that they don't is because it would be expensive, salt water creates a lot of corrosion issues and because there are no laws or regulations requiring them to do so.

If a law was passed that said datacenters couldn't be a net user of potable water, then they would use more expensive cooling immediately and ClaudeAI would cost an extra $0.38/mo. The solution is to pass meaningful regulations to protect fresh water.

This is a very solvable issue... even in deserts (which can use vapor compression cooling, like your home AC/refridgerator). It's just more expensive and nobody is forcing them to pay that expense.

[–] Ilixtze@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Important Edit: Our existing energy production does not exist separate from AI industries. AI Data centers are built on TOP of our current energy production and they are actively leeching energy at projected rates that displace human consumption. Making them orders of magnitude more wasteful. Which makes this whole argument about corn and ethanol incredibly disingenuous.

Then there is all that we already know: AI tech oligarchs in general are the ones primarily lobbying and kissing trump's ass to remove regulations from the energy industries, and more wasteful and harmful technologies will be used to push the massive scale of datacenters they need to secure their unreal funding rounds. All this corruption is built ON TOP of already harmful energy systems and it's not meant to fix them for the better.

With that said: The corn industry in part feeds people, my country has a rich culinary tradition that stems from corn and it's derivatives.

Generative ai is wasteful useless crap. Also gen ai is projected to scale many times more just to become profitable. The corn industry already is. Also generative AI not only uses a lot of water; It uses an exorbitant amount of electricity and infrastructure costs, that based on the hype cycle for untenable and physically impossible "AGI" it will continue to ramp up more costs related to infrastructure and training that will bleed other more useful industries and infrastructure ventures dry.

Gen AI is a problem that is particularly capitalist. But there is no country in the world that has the socialist logic to humanize the use of AI. (Not even china.) Our reality is corrupt capitalist oligarchy and we engage with it that way. not in hypotheticals.

Open source models are the spearhead of a disruption cycle. The initial part of the business where corporations subsidize their costs and loose money to hook you in and de-skill you. When that cycle is over, open source models will become more scarce, unsupported and potentially ilegal, foreign companies that provide local models will become outlawed with the argument pf "security risks" and AI corporations will increase their prices many times over to allow the plebs access to their technology that monopolizes, centralizes and promotes government control and approval across culture and most industries. For this reason the argument of open source models is useless.

As a final note; The meme is too soft in order to be funny; A more accurate messaging would be that "the king wants to use the people's resources to have a mechanism that can be unnacountable for bombing schools full of children and funneling money into mass surveillance of it's subjects."

[–] bridgeenjoyer@gamepad.club 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

@Ilixtze @FauxLiving I'm sorry but you're incorrect, the very large majority of corn in the US goes to fuel ethanol to feed cars. Only a small percent goes to food, and its shit like corn syrup thats horrible for you anyway.

Corn industry is heavily propped up by subsidies. Its not small local farmers either. Its giant corpo farms, which need to dissapear.

Stop using millions of acres for corn, use some for panels and wind and let the rest return to natural prairie as it should be.

[–] Ilixtze@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Not where i live: My country produced in 2025 around 20 millions of tons of corn and most of it was used for food production. And most of our culinary products are derived from corn; i write as i put some eggs and chilorio into a tortilla and shove it in my mouth.

Also interesting that for a country like mine that consumes so much corn , corn syrup is only commonly used in the manufactured food industry. and even corn syrup that is bad for your health is ten times better than a technology that is used as an excuse to bomb children and impose mass surveillance. Corn is awesome dude , come have some tacos and stop coping.

As commented above Our existing energy infrastructure does not exist separate from AI industries. AI Data centers is build on TOP of our energy and food production making them twice as wasteful. Our whole industries exist to support human life, not useless chatbots. What is worse, in your case, the United States: The endemic corruption; lack of energy infrastructure funding and the fact that energy regulations have been systematically destroyed with the help of lobbying by the AI tech Oligarchs themselves will make it so that more wasteful technologies than just Ethanol are used to power The useless AI bubble.

So it's insulting to hear people suggest that our current industries are separate from AI data centers. It is an anti-human attitude. Our industries can be improved, made more clean and human and AI in it's current form and logic is doing the oposite.

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You are aware that the vast vast majority of people do not live where you live? That’s how living somewhere works.

[–] Ilixtze@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

also i must push the point forward that no mater where you live; AI data center industries are not separate from existing energy and food infrastructure; but built on top of it and leeching from it, which makes the whole corn argument invalid. That aside from the fact that is inherently anti-human to try to try to compare our existing food and energy infrastructures with an emerging technology that not only hasn't proved itself, it is plagued with corruption and manufactured hype funded by the worst oligarchs in the world.

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

which are shipped around the country to be burned, injecting carbon into the atmosphere.

While I broadly agree with your comment, this line is a stretch. The carbon released is only from transportation and fertilizer production. The carbon inside the ethanol itself is actually pulled from the environment, so that part is actually carbon neutral.

The big problem with ethanol production is that it takes 5 gallons of fuel to produce 4 gallons of ethanol. It's literally just pissing away time, money, and resources just to subsidize farmers.

[–] nBodyProblem@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It’s valuable for reducing smog and makes great fuel for performance cars

[–] bridgeenjoyer@gamepad.club 1 points 1 week ago

@nBodyProblem @mnemonicmonkeys at a 40% efficiency hit yes. It is great for turbos!

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It’s valuable for reducing smog

And EV's are even better at it. And public transportation.

Overall, we need to work towards on mass public transport, EV's in smaller vehicles, and hydrogen fuels for larger vehicles. Ethanol could still be produced for the things that absolutely can't work as an EV or fuel cell, but the scale we make it at is way larger than needed for that

[–] nBodyProblem@lemmy.world 0 points 5 days ago

Okay? How is that relevant?

Basically nobody in the current era is suggesting ethanol as an alternative to any of the things you are mentioning, and realistically ethanol is not being used as a primary fuel source. Most cars can’t even take E85 without modifications. It’s used as a fuel additive, for which is has significant public health benefits, and for industrial uses like a perfumery ingredient or a solvent

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah it isn't the strongest point, I'll admit.

I should say that the corn is carbon neutral but the other inputs, such as the fertilizer and the machinery used to irrigate and harvest it do product net positive carbon. In addition, the opportunity cost is that we're not using that water and land to grow food creating secondary affects for the people that need to eat food.

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

In addition, the opportunity cost is that we're not using that water and land to grow food creating secondary affects for the people that need to eat food.

Eh, the US is a net calorie exporter regarding food. We make enough to feed everyone.

A bigger problem is the additional land needed to grow the corn for ethanol. That demands expansion of agricultural land, which means destroying forests and wetlands which are extremely important for sustaining ecosystems.

You know how people are going on about ecological collapse and how the drop off in insect populations are the biggest warning sign? That's caused by humans tearing down their ecosystems for farming and land development.

Also, the reason I didn't include fertilizer and other fuel costs in pointing out that the ethanol itself is carbon-neutral is because the other parts of the process can potentially be changed to be carbon neutral as well. Not right now, but the tech is being worked on

[–] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world -3 points 1 week ago

Whataboutism.

[–] sheetzoos@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

Some people would have you believe we're living on Arrakis.