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.)
According to the paper you’re referencing, the most common use case is practical guidance. I’d argue that that directly opposes this statement. Those activities are actively engaging both the AI and the human, so however much freshwater it would take for the human to do independent research or whatever is appropriate on the topics they’re asking AI about is still being used by the human using the AI, but the AI’s water use is occurring in addition to that.
Same goes for “seeking information”, the second most common use case. This one I suppose comes down to how the AI is being used. If someone is asking the AI a question and taking the response they get at face value and doing nothing further, they will invariably spend less time than doing independent research, however the quality of that result is roughly equivalent to just typing it into a search engine and trusting whatever the top result is, which is also a very low time consuming task. In either case, the human is engaged during the whole process, so the AI is adding additional water usage.
In the case of writing / editing / translating, the AI is probably doing the task appreciably faster than the human would and I could perhaps see your stance holding true.
For fiction generation, I assume they’re talking about having the AI write something for the user’s consumption (e.g. roleplaying with the AI)… the examples they give are “Crafting poems, stories, or fictional content”. Is reading AI generated fiction really any better than reading a book? Because reading a book is certainly going to consume less water than having the AI write that fiction. I don’t see the appeal in AI-generated fiction personally, so I might not understand the common use case here.
I’ll also add as a tangential point that this only accounts for AI use that’s intentional and targeted (e.g. asking ChatGPT a question). If you also consider all of the “involuntary” AI use - for example, AI generated entries at the top of search results when none were requested or wanted - there’s a quantity of resources - not only water, but power, as well, which I think is the bigger concern overall, particularly in the US right now - being spent for zero benefit.
Regarding your points about the time that would otherwise be spent writing emails or looking up recipes, if that’s an accurate representation of how much time you spend on those tasks, I can at least concede that using AI to accomplish them is saving you a considerable amount of time. I think you’re in a stark minority in the amount of time you spend on those tasks, however.
One issue with AI generated recipes that I will point out is that the AI doesn’t actually know how to make that thing, it’s just compiling what it thinks is a reasonable recipe based on the recipes it has been trained with. Even if we assume that the ingredient quantities make sense for what you’re making, chances are the food will taste better - particularly for complex dishes - if you’re using a recipe curated by humans rather than an AI approximation.
Practical guidance queries should be compared against searching for practical guidance, yes? So if you would be searching 4-5x times, the AI has cut that time from the process. Especially so if you find a guide that lacks one extra bit of context, AI lets you ask the follow up and get an answer in the same format and context, while search would require re-reading what you already know and cross checking it. If the knowledge you need isn’t written in a convenient place/format, and you would have used a person, then the AI has successfully cut humans in the loop in half.
I know less people who do this intentionally (see involuntary AI use below). Those I do are using it for stack-exchange style questions, where the information is highly context specific, probably only present in a few forums, and would require a lot of effort to get a precise search result (lots of AND’s and NOT’s and site filtering). I think these difficult searches are probably not what ‘seeking information’ usually means, and would agree this use is not great.
This one depends a lot on book maintenance, construction, and availability. Note libraries, bookstores, and ebook hosting take labor, power, and water too.
Most generated fiction is in niche genre’s I think, so the cost of getting a human to write it would be astronomically worse. And while I am just as happy reading the original Dracula instead of an ultra-specific undertale fanfic, I have a hard time telling someone else that they are literally interchangable.
Yeah I do endorse these uses as efficient. They are bad/stupid/silly. I’ve disabled them where possible, and welcome others to do the same. That said, this water waste is likely small compared to other (equally terrible) industrial practices (we don’t need to triple wash every carrot, and powerwashing various vehicles and surfaces is often not efficient or needed).
Yeah, I’ve just had a terrible time finding actual humans providing recipes on the internet. I am entirely prepared to believe this is a skill issue on my part. YouTube has helped somewhat, but now we’re comparing an LLM to video hosting+processing and ~5 minutes taking careful notes along the way.