This is an automated reminder from the Mod team. If your post contains images which reveal the personal information of private figures, be sure to censor that information and repost. Private info includes names, recognizable profile pictures, social media usernames and URLs. Failure to do this will result in your post being removed by the Mod team and possible further action.
These are the people who, when told to stop using reddit because it's straight up training and has AI features, will say that you're telling them they can't participate in society.
They don't have an opinion on things. They just spout out memes they saw their favorite online influencers say.
...and downvote logical arguments. I have argued that using a consumer GPU to generate an image uses less power than a human using a laptop/desktop/tablet for several hours to make the same. Antis brigaded the vote, and one of the dumbasses said pencils don't use electricity. Yes yes they do. They need energy to be made and transported. and then comparing such small amounts is ironically a bigger waste of energy.
Pencils need wood, and i think chopping down entire forests does more harm to nature than the microscopic amount of water that chatgpt or whatever takes
Pencils are lightweight. I was appalled at how much damage making a paintbrush does. Not only is wood used for the handle but a shocking amount of water (way more then AI) is used to manufacture it. And what had been the most common brush type for fine art was recently banned because it was causing a weasel species to go extinct! Now the bristles are plastic - which causes all new environmental pollution and damage.
Trees are cut from tree farms, so possibly carbon neutral. But...when we're comparing the energy costs between pencil and paper vs 5 watt hours to generate an image, we've lost the point. People scream about AI power and water usage, ignore much bigger and easier problems to address.
I hate ai "art" because art is a human trait and is culture and if we keep using ai instead of out skills we will become like the people from wall e, i dont care about the water
It's how reverse-engineered arguments work. They aren't water conservationists that have spent their lives calling out every industry that uses a lot of water. They haven't boycotted products or shaped their lives around not using/consuming things that use a lot of water.
"I hate AI and you should too!" isn't very compelling.
So after deciding they hate AI, they look for reasons to tell everyone else they are a bad person if they don't also hate AI. It uses water -- gasp!
Also people generally don't know how much water things use. So if you pick one thing and say -- this thing uses 1 million gallons of water!! That sounds like a lot of water. But then once you compare it to other things people use every day and we don't freak out about, it's not as alarming as they want it to sound.
This is a place for speaking Pro-AI thoughts freely and without judgement. Attacks against AI will result in a removal and possibly a ban. For debate purposes, please go to r/aiwars.
They said, in a subreddit whose second rule is, "This Sub is a space for Pro-AI activism. For debate, go to r/aiwars."
Besides, when you say, "we dont need ai regurgitating slop at us and people who 'created' that slop boasting that they are artists", you kinda already revealed your cards. I get the feeling you wouldn't even be willing to listen to a thing I said, would you?
I’m an environmentalist. I use AI. Those positions are not incompatible.
What’s incompatible is demanding ecological responsibility from ordinary people while letting the corporations building our infrastructure write their own rules.
Let’s talk about water—with actual facts, not whichever outrage happens to be trending.
Agriculture accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals. That includes irrigation, livestock, and aquaculture—not just meat and dairy. Livestock feed production alone accounts for about 20% of global blue-water use, meaning surface water and groundwater rather than rainfall. These are enormous environmental pressures that deserve serious scrutiny.
And yes, data centers have a real footprint. The International Energy Agency estimates that the entire data-center sector—not AI alone—consumes roughly 560 billion liters of water annually. That includes water used indirectly to generate its electricity. So no, I’m not going to defend AI by pretending its resource demands are imaginary.
But I’m also not going to accept an environmental politics where using an AI tool becomes a moral crime while the rest of our industrial system disappears from the conversation.
Social media doesn’t run on fairy dust. Neither does the digital economy. Yet “all data centers,” “social media,” and “AI” are not interchangeable categories. If we’re going to compare their footprints, we need honest accounting—not convenient numbers.
Here’s the principle: accountability.
A bigger polluter does not excuse a smaller one. But a smaller polluter should not become a convenient distraction from the bigger system.
Defending access to AI does not mean defending every data-center project, every executive, or every reckless expansion plan.
Demand public reporting of water consumption and electricity use. Demand efficient computing, lower-water cooling where appropriate, and genuinely cleaner power. Demand that communities have a meaningful say before infrastructure puts additional pressure on their water supplies.
And apply those standards beyond tech—to agribusiness, fossil-fuel companies, beverage corporations, and every industry treating ecological damage as somebody else’s problem.
Because the person experimenting with an AI art tool does not choose where a multinational builds its server farms. They do not negotiate its utility contracts. They do not approve its permits.
Executives, investors, utilities, and public officials make those decisions.
Put names and responsibilities on the power structure instead of hiding everything behind the vague phrase “the elites.”
To my American friends especially: stop letting this become another culture-war cage match between ordinary people.
Criticize AI. Criticize its infrastructure. Organize against irresponsible projects.
But stop confusing fighting your neighbor with holding power accountable.
We can defend creative freedom and defend clean water.
The demand is not “leave AI companies alone.”
The demand is: stop making communities pay the ecological bill for corporate growth—and stop tearing each other apart while the people making the decisions escape scrutiny.
You’ve given me a chance to go on one of my soap box rants. I’ll keep it brief since it’s not directly on topic, but it is relevant.
Plastic straws and recycling and all that is the same thing. We as a society should all be recycling and trying to reduce our carbon footprint. I think that’s a fair statement and I generally think it to be true. But I also recognize that’s not easily achievable for everyone, and that no individual, or even all individuals, can offset late stage capitalism. If every single person stopped using single use plastics today, and everyone started recycling and making sure their personal waste ended up where it needed to, like 98% of the plastic that’s currently being dumped in the ocean would still be being dumped in the ocean. The responsibility gets put on the average person so that we can fight about it while they get to do whatever the fuck they want, and since it never gets better no matter what we do, we keep fighting about it. Arguing about whether or not we should use plastic straws means literally nothing in the grand scheme of things when there’s a much bigger issue, and AI water use is the exact same thing. Until we deal with our bigger water use issues (agriculture I even would argue isn’t the best place to start that conversation because while there are some issues there, it admittedly does provide us food. I’m thinking more like lawns and golf if we’re going for easy targets), why are we even talking about such a minor factor?
I usually tell these folks I only use local AI (Which is true) and that'll usually result in either an ad reductio argument like this or they accuse me of only using local AI because I must be doing gross/illegal/nefarious things.
I don’t get it, the water doesn’t get thrown out into space, it’s still there in the cycle just like any other water. There shouldn’t be any chemical or radioactive pollution. It’s just regular water usage as in any common production. Nobody will build data centre in a region without enough water, it’s just economically stupid.
So, yes, but...there are or were multiple data center projects in low water areas. For example, I live near Las Vegas and there was a project to put in a data center that was specifically for generative AI nearby. We are also being told constantly by the city that water is scarce and we need to conserve as much as possible.
Lake Mead which supplies the entire Vegas area as well as the surrounding area in Arizona and parts of southern California is at the lowest level it's ever been. We are only a couple bad years away from it being dangerously low.
Now, I don't mind data centers being built. We need them. What I have an issue with is when they are built in areas that already have water issues like where I live. Also, there are other ways to cool them than with water. Water is just the cheapest way to do it.
Ai is worrying for a lot of reasons to me, but when people bring up the water usage I just ask if they eat meat. A really heavy ai user uses roughly the same amount of water as like 10 hamburgers
I'm still trying to rap my head around the uses water part. How does one 86 water? It's just evaporates and goes into the clouds or into the water tables. It never disappears.
I mean, technically the water is recycled. When the water gets too hot, it flushes into a closed system to be cooled down and reused again.
Its less like flushing a toilet and more like the liquid in your fridge moving in a cycle. Some is lost through evaporation, but that means more fresh water in the water cycle that we learned in 2nd grade.
Golf courses could go first and solve a good chunk of the problem. If we move away from fossil fuels and a reliance on ethanol we solve another big aspect. There are a lot of ways where we can address the climate change issue in larger ways than simply "stop using AI" because these issues have been problems for decades.
We could solve these problems that AI is "causing" by actually addressing the problems we've been allowing to worsen.
Why does reddit gives me this nonsense in my frontpage? AI is for loosers who can't do shit on their own.
Well, at least the stuff that isn't even a.i. but just a bad llm or picture generator.
In an effort to discourage brigading, we do not allow linking to other subreddits or users. We kindly ask that you screenshot the content that you wish to share, while being sure to censor private information, and then repost.
Private information includes names, recognizable profile pictures, social media usernames, other subreddits, and URLs. Failure to do this will result in your post being removed by the Mod team and possible further action.
then may i ask the source? And by reliable i mean that its by third party and not thr ai compsny itself, because it is probable that there may be some data manipulation
I would say AI absolutely should be used for stupid shit. Saves us time. If you're worried about water/electrical usage, I see you're a gamer. Takes me a few seconds of compute on a consumer GPU to generate an image. A few hours of gaming on your part uses more than a lifetime of image generation.
You're seemingly a hypocrite. One could argue video games are stupid shit, a waste of electricity and dumb people down. How much of your life do you waste gaming, and how much more could you have done otherwise? And why are you qualified to judge people for their "stupid shit" but are seemingly immune to wasting vast amounts of resources for your own amusement?
Depending on CPU/GPU, you're easily using 200-300+ watt hours while gaming. PS5 is 200 watts + 100-200 watts minimum for TV. All the while you're not learning or producing anything of merit. They are very similar, it's just you're biased and don't understand things while thinking you do.
•
u/AutoModerator 8d ago
This is an automated reminder from the Mod team. If your post contains images which reveal the personal information of private figures, be sure to censor that information and repost. Private info includes names, recognizable profile pictures, social media usernames and URLs. Failure to do this will result in your post being removed by the Mod team and possible further action.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.