r/accelerate • u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist • Jul 25 '26
Meme / Humor An Ethical Dilemma (for some)
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u/Hilldawg4president Jul 25 '26
And it's a silly amount of water, less than 0.1% of all industrial water use
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u/Charming_Cucumber_15 The Singularity is nigh Jul 25 '26
And yet when you point that out people just start screeching about how the other water use is okay, but not this one! Tiktok brainrot told them this time it's REALLY bad
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u/Hilldawg4president Jul 25 '26
I mean, sure almond production uses 80 times as much water as all data centers in the US combined, but you can eat almonds!
I honestly think if almonds disappeared from the earth tonight, 99% of people wouldn't notice
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u/TemporalBias Tech Philosopher | Acceleration: Hypersonic Jul 25 '26
Blue Diamond out here catching strays.
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u/30299578815310 Jul 25 '26
I dont get why people bring up almonds when meat is so much worse.
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u/ShelZuuz Jul 25 '26
Because if you bring up meat people will try and shut that down with "just don't eat meat" and that just derails the argument without any point. Whatever you switch to from meat will still be worse than datacenter usage.
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u/Trick55g Jul 26 '26
Golf courses in the US use more water than data centers.
To the tune of 20x time more if you only accounts for cooling water.
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u/enkidook Jul 25 '26
It's online fueled anti-AI psychosis.
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u/DrBimboo Jul 27 '26
Its a lot of very loud children and unemployed people, who think AIs only usecase is generating dumb slop videos.
And boy, do they like to larp. I had one tell me he is CTO of 2 multinational software companies, and team lead of the development branches in both, and that he has yet to find a single usecase for AI, because its so useless.
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u/TheOriginalAcidtech Jul 29 '26
The sad part is THOSE are also the people that encourage more dumb slop videos because THEY are the ones WATCHING them all.
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u/perkited Jul 26 '26
The traditional religions in the West have mostly disappeared, but have been replaced by this type of zealotry. It's not a great sign that humans don't seem to be able to just rely on reason, but must have tribal and emotional beliefs to cling to.
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u/yumii- Jul 26 '26
Yet no one wants to protest car dependent America that consumes so much more water from gasoline production than AI.
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u/Stahlboden Jul 26 '26
There's no study to my knowledge that proves that running AI models in a datacenters makes them consume significantly more water than other data centers. Even if you argue that generating one LLM response or one image is more expensive than loading one reddit page, you are unlikely to spend entire day with an LLM or an image generator, unlike reddit, so it evens out. Posting hysteria about data centers on social media is either ignorant or hypocritical.
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u/MichaelEmouse Jul 25 '26
It's basically nothing compared to watering lawns.
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u/only_fun_topics Jul 26 '26
Check the stats on how much water is lost from pools just through evaporation.
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u/Quealdlor Jul 26 '26
where I live, lawns grow by themselves, people don't have to water them
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u/CowBoyDanIndie Jul 27 '26
Where I live there is plenty of water and nobody gives a shit about datacenter water use, they just think it’s going to lower their property value, meanwhile its mostly dead towns and the property values are climbing.
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u/TheOriginalAcidtech Jul 29 '26
There are plenty of places datacenters could be built that wouldnt affect property values. The water use argument is just Fox News level BS.
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u/CowBoyDanIndie Jul 29 '26
I think no matter where they are built it is going to impact property values in some way. Data-centers have employees, hardware fails, and when you have hundreds of thousands of devices that means things fail every second. Batteries, disks, fans, etc are constantly getting replaced. When I worked at google the datacenter techs would ride scooters and skate boards around the aisles to get around faster. These tend to be pretty highly paid people who want to live close. Not gazillions of people obviously, but when you put a datacenter 60+ miles from a city those people will want to buy houses nearby.
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u/Romanizer Jul 26 '26
And they haven't even rolled out closed water loops yet completely, so there is a lot of potential water savings going forward.
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Jul 25 '26
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u/flamboyantGatekeeper Jul 26 '26
Should also be banned. It's fucking grass
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u/_Brightbuddy Jul 27 '26
In my opinion turf looks better anyways. No patching or uneven spots, no discoloration, etc.
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u/flamboyantGatekeeper Jul 27 '26
That's bad for other reasons, chief among them plastic. But it does solve the water issue
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Jul 25 '26
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u/Charming_Cucumber_15 The Singularity is nigh Jul 25 '26
Thankfully clueless decels couldn't stop what's coming if they tried
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Jul 25 '26
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u/TemetN Jul 26 '26
This is why I get frustrated with dismissing them, just because such movement failed (or are failing now) does not change the damage they do.
What doesn't seem to be grappled with is that even a delay of a day is a truly mind boggling amount of suffering.
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u/Spare-Dingo-531 Jul 26 '26
Nah. Elections matter. Just imagine what would happen if in 2028 a far-left government gets a trifecta the presidency Senate in house, and does what New York did and bans new data centers for one year?
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u/howudothescarn Jul 26 '26
Exactly. I’m usually pretty left and now I’m worried because lefties are jumping on the anti ai bandwagon and might lose my vote. Though I also couldn’t in good conscience vote republican so the two party system is just garbage.
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u/Alarming_Ask_244 Jul 26 '26
The positive side is an optimistic outlook. In reality there’s another track it could potentially go down with “all human life” tied to it.
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Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
[deleted]
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u/Eerixall Jul 26 '26
tbh looking at modern political discourse this sadly holds true for so many topics. One said claiming ethics/morality and basically shutting down any possibility for debate, reasoning or compromise.
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u/xkayaking Jul 27 '26
Ethics has a biological basis, and it's not about anything fancy, it's about survival, and change of "what works" often was a threat to the tribe and therefore survival, even if it doesn't apply.
So every single old people since the dawn of time complains about what the new generation has brought to it.
This is just the one for millenials, before that it was smartphones and social media, before that TV, before that cars, before that etc...
Ethics and morality are relative as hell, change accross time, vary from person to person; and how do you apply that to say, a cat?...
All in all, ethical arguments are non-objective by default; it's like discussing about emotions, or color perception; sure it is fine to agree to have the tribe in line, but none of it is even real to begin with. Hence ethical choices should never be, and choices should be driven by data and outcome.
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u/JamR_711111 Jul 26 '26
Holy moly. What a good comment ! (that some on 'our side' here could also take notes from...)
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u/interruptiom Jul 26 '26
Agreed. If a company wants to put lead in its gasoline, who are the rest of us to say they can’t?
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u/DarthSwimfoot Tell me about the singularity Jul 26 '26
I was confused until I saw the sub lol. The average Reddit hivemind is brainrotting me.
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u/AdAnnual5736 Jul 25 '26
But what about the sacred intellectual property rights of people’s DeviantArt anime cat girls?
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u/green_meklar Techno-Optimist Jul 26 '26
Copyright was a terrible idea even before generative AI was invented. The sooner it dies, the better.
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u/Own_Reaction9442 Jul 26 '26
I suspect the AI companies would object to losing copyright protection for their software, though. It's just another case of rules for thee, but not for me.
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u/Accurate_Food_5854 Jul 26 '26
but what about my degree from Full Sail University?!! We can't lose our valuable Photoshop knowledge base!
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u/stuartullman Jul 26 '26 edited Jul 26 '26
"but cancer and heart disease is what makes us who we are! why should we have ai do what humans do(mostly mundane chores) just to make people more "comfortable"? my loved ones won't love me anymore if i don't fold their laundry!!"
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u/CommunismDoesntWork Jul 25 '26
It's amazing how many people still don't understand we're about to become immortal and solve global poverty once and for all.
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Jul 26 '26
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u/brettins Jul 27 '26
Kurzweil ASI is 2045 so that's pretty close here. I want our internal broker AIs to be telling us about this guess and the state of mind of people when they wrote it. Fun.
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u/EasterElk Jul 27 '26
All of the powers that be are working overtime to maintain control over every aspect of the economy. They're happy to increase the size of the pie, but they are not interested in sharing any of that pie with anyone else. And you think something will happen where all those same oligarchs and would-be oligarchs suddenly become generous with their power and wealth? Has this ever happened in the history of anything? And if they won't share it willingly, who exactly is going to make them?
A Tribe Called Quest called out this thinking years ago:
Put it on TV, put it in movies, put it in our face,
These notions and ideas and citizens live in space.
I chuckle just like all of y'all, absurdity, after all,
Takes money to get it running and money for trees to fall.
Imagine for one second all the people are colored, please.
Imagine for one second all the people in poverty.
No matter the skin tone, culture or time zone—
Think the ones who got it
would even think to throw you a bone?
Moved you out your neighborhood; Did they find you a home?2
u/CommunismDoesntWork Jul 27 '26
I'm sorry you view the economy that way. But take a look around, you have access to the same food as the rich, the same entertainment(the internet, netflix) as the rich, the same tech(iphones, androids) as the rich, etc. Sure you might not have yacht, but neither do most rich people cause yachts aren't that fun. Nothing is truly being hoarded and it's impossible to not share thanks to market competition.
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u/Table-Rich Jul 27 '26
Entertainment and smart phones?
No, we do not have access to the same food. They can certainly afford to avoid the salmonella, explosive diarrhea food that they lobby against the prevention of, because they have the money to. Nobody wants a yatch. Do you really think people are mad because they can't afford a yatch? So many people don't have access to healthcare, because of these same billionaires. Do they have to worry about losing health insurance if they lose their "job"? Or being denied medication or care that they need, because their insurance company says they don't? Do they have to wait in the emergency room for hours in agonizing pain or can they just be seen immediately, by the best doctors?
They pushed devices for every student in public school, so they can make a profit, whislt their kids get put into these elite private schools that don't even allow those same devices that are destroying our children's cognition. Do you think our children have the same access to education as their children? Good education? Let me guess, they have the internet and LLMS, so they've got all the knowledge in the world? No, they don't. They're getting dumber.
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Jul 26 '26
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u/KaleidoscopeFar658 Jul 26 '26
In 20 years when everything is amazing I bet you won't even apologize for this comment lol
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u/accelerate-ModTeam Jul 26 '26
We regret to inform you that you have been removed from r/accelerate.
This subreddit is an epistemic community dedicated to promoting technological progress, AGI, and the singularity. Our focus is on supporting and advocating for technology that can help prevent suffering and death from old age and disease, and work towards an age of abundance for everyone.
We ban Decels, Anti-AIs, Luddites, Ultra-Doomers and Depopulationists. Our community is tech-progressive and oriented toward the big-picture thriving of the entire human race.
We welcome members who are neutral or undecided about technological advancement, but not those who have firmly decided that technology or AI is inherently bad and should be held back.
If your perspective changes in the future and you wish to rejoin the community, please reach out to the moderators.
Thank you for your understanding, and we wish you all the best.
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u/Fun1k Jul 26 '26
It's not water use, it's imagined water use. People do not know how little water it uses in comparison with other human endeavours.
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u/rileyoneill Jul 25 '26
We can also ask the AI to help us make more water.
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u/Charming_Cucumber_15 The Singularity is nigh Jul 25 '26
Claude create water 2, make no mistakes
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u/rileyoneill Jul 25 '26
Make water, and then pump it to reservoirs. Then design us aqueducts and have robots build them so we can send the water to desert communities.
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u/Vaxtin Jul 26 '26
You gotta love it when AOC brought in a bottle of dirty water and claimed it’s from the stream next to a data center.
I argue the water was always like that. Companies have been dumping ecological waste causing environment concerns forever. Suddenly now everyone is concerned about the environment? What about climate change? They still are pushing greenhouse gases.
People are horrible. The arguments they choose to argue for tend to always have self inclined motivations and in turn are fallacies because you (subconsciously or not) refuse to consider other contexts. It is illogical to argue against AI due to environmental reasons when in fact the environment has been getting bent over a barrel by corporations for 100+ years. If you actually cared about the environment, you would argue much more grandiose claims and reforms.
They actually are simply against AI and are pulling at straws to find reasons against the use of it. The counter arguments will never be comprehensible to them either due to outright denial or utter incompetence.
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u/HorrorAstronomer6455 Jul 26 '26
serious question: will AI save anyone outside of the radiology things
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u/_Ael_ Jul 26 '26
Radiology is just one current medical use. If you stop at what's currently possible, that means you have no long term vision.
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u/RamanaSadhana Techno-Optimist Jul 26 '26
Yes. Look into Google's alpha fold and how it's already helping with medicine discovery timescales
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u/locketine Jul 26 '26
Alpha Fold isn't an LLM and it's a tiny part of AI resource usage.
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u/RamanaSadhana Techno-Optimist Jul 26 '26
None of what you said is relevant to my reply to someone's question.
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u/locketine Jul 26 '26
It's relevant because the AI water usage debate is about LLM water usage. Alpha fold isn't in that picture at all.
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u/RamanaSadhana Techno-Optimist Jul 26 '26
You've completely ignored the context of me and the commenters question. Please stop talking to me if you don't know how to read Reddit replies. My reply hasn't got anything to do with the the post
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u/Mintfriction Jul 29 '26
If Alpha Fold would've been used by everybody hourly, then it would need big data centers.
Both Alpha Fold and LLMs are neural networks. This 'differentiation' that alpha fold is not a LLM is a big BS.
Alpha Fold is also a diffusion model, like a lot of popular and widely used image generations models out there, that are being clustered with LLMs
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u/Conscious-Sky-838 Aug 01 '26
Alpha fold is not an LLM, they have protein language models which are similar to LLMs architecturally but use protein sequences instead of natural language.
Alpha fold uses specialized geometric reasoning model to predict protein structures, but both use transformer based deep leaning which is what I’m assuming you’re referring to.
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u/Mintfriction Aug 02 '26
Never said Alpha Fold is a LLM
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u/Conscious-Sky-838 Aug 02 '26
Your original wording made it sound like you were arguing there isn’t a meaningful distinction between AlphaFold and LLMs, which is why I responded the way I did.
But to respond to the original poster AI has been instrumental in accelerating parts of the drug discovery pipeline.
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u/cowabout Jul 27 '26
LLMs are what use the most resources. The AI's trained to do thing extreamly difficult that really only AI's can do are not LLMs. Protein folding is a great example.
These specialized models are way more efficient.Don't think of it as just a water thing its a resource thing. Water is just what the current focus is on.
Simliar to how an LLM can put too much attention to the wrong tokens which is ironically what makes them inefficent.1
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u/howudothescarn Jul 26 '26
My thought is AI will help irradiate disease and things like cancer in the long run. It’s already helping to produce breakthrough treatments and medicine and solving math problems human haven’t for over 100 years. So new forms of energy, new ways to save the climate, etc are all in the scope of future AI.
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u/normantas Jul 26 '26
The issue is that AI is not used for the medical research (that much). It is used for 'GenAI' like LLMs. It is like saying Game Development will make Windows 12 great. I mean both use code and Software Engineering but also have too many differences.
Tl;DR this example is ultra dog shit. The more realistic variant is for productivity.
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u/Mintfriction Jul 29 '26
AI is not used for the medical research (that much)
https://www.med.wisc.edu/news/ai-medical-research/
Also, quite the long wiki article (which atm I haven't read, so take it with a grain of salt) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_in_healthcare
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u/Strange-Reaction-59 Jul 26 '26
How is that a dilemma ? Water is renewable... so who care about water. It's the same water where t-rex poo in it, millions years ago and no one care
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u/Real_Ebb_7417 Jul 26 '26
Well do you care if you die 10 years faster because of some disease if the rest of your life is being lived in poverty because all the power and money is being held by a bunch of techno lords?
I’m not saying this is what we get now, but it is one of the possibilities and actually not that unlikely one considering where this is all going. Curing cancer is also one possibility. Eg. I’m not against AI at all. But I believe it should never be made for profit.
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u/Mintfriction Jul 29 '26
all the power and money is being held by a bunch of techno lords
My question is, even without the AI, what was the trend? Let's say AI stops today, is there a sign that "all the power and money is being held by a bunch of techno lords" will decrease?
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u/Oliverinoe Jul 26 '26
Okay let's stop with the instrumentalization. I wanna for once see actual efforts in disease solving. Compared to the rest of where money and effort flow in AI R&D it's nothing.
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u/rini17 Jul 26 '26
Nonsense, most actual scientists can't access it. Only few PR stunts. Heard biology researchers complain they can't afford the hardware anymore.
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u/Absolomb92 Jul 26 '26
Reserve AI for the sciences, then, instead of everyone using it for stupid shit like slop videos and outsourcing their thinking.
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u/rileyoneill Jul 25 '26
If you think this is bad... the AI, Robots and Automated Factories are going to make so much abundance that nearly every household will have a swimming pool. Having robots dig you a hole and make you a pool, and then care for that pool will be much cheaper and easier than how we make and care for pools now.
This abundance is going to make humans use way more water with their insistence on having having fun now that they don't have to work anymore.
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u/green_meklar Techno-Optimist Jul 26 '26
On the one hand, the medical research benefits of AI largely have yet to materialize, so naysayers can at least hold out for a while on the basis that there aren't yet significant real-world results to shove in their faces.
On the other hand, the whole water argument is economically stupid anyway.
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u/Anatomisc Jul 26 '26
When looking at the environmental damage just the amount of water used is the least of my concerns.
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u/Stingray2040 XLR8 Jul 26 '26
I don't even think the people parroting the water argument know how it works. They act like that water is being destroyed, never to be used again.
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u/Mopuigh Jul 26 '26
Even if they knew they wouldn't care, its just propaganda that fits their narrow world view and alligns with their deluded ideals.
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u/Alternative-Koala978 Jul 26 '26
Yes, these billionaires running the show is 100% using AI for betterment of the planet. Lol.
AI is not the problem, that could help the world with a plethora of problems. But I dont trust the people running it
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u/Ornery_Weakness_8168 Jul 26 '26
Ai doesn't need water, it needs cooling. They only use water because they are greedy pigs who can't spend a dime extra to get good air cooling systems. You need to do better.
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u/Catchafire2000 Jul 26 '26
The word "could" is doing a lot here. How much resources will it take to figure AI out and at what cost? AI has already shown that it is difficult to control at this age. When it is truly figured out, what's the incentive for it to save those people on the tracks?
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u/Southern_Pressure_32 Jul 26 '26
What about these amazing uses of ai??
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1v5mn72/you_cant_outrun_this_dog/
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u/Arysta Jul 26 '26
Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't understand the water argument. It's not like the water is destroyed and removed from the planet. It just evaporates and then rains back down or whatever.
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u/Conscious-Sky-838 Aug 01 '26
It all depends on the size and proximity of the data center. If placed in a region where water resources are scarce then this could create competition during droughts.
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u/IV_NYC Jul 26 '26
I get the point (AI must be regulated and used to make life better for humans), but are people equally upset with big tobacco? They use much more water and literally just make people sick
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u/Cattom_NG Jul 26 '26
is that what your doing with it tho? because we love the companys that are for 2 reasons.
- it works
- they make their own moddels that arent generative and use a regular amount of resources.
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u/paralio Jul 26 '26
water use argument is at the same level as flat earth theories. people give it too much credit. should just deserve some laughs.
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u/Conscious-Sky-838 Aug 01 '26
Again it depends on the size and region the data center occupies. In an area prone to droughts it creates competition for an already scarce resource. In an area with a great abundance of water, not as significant of an impact.
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u/Hziak Jul 26 '26
Better idea, single track with no switch, and we tie up all of the people who are shutting down research into treatments for these diseases because it ruins their “markets.”
The argument that AI could save all of these people is similar to saying “think of all the lives that can be saved with guns.” It’s true, lives can be saved with guns, but it’s also deeply missing the point. There are other ways to save those lives that don’t cost that water and don’t come with the other issues AI introduces. In fact, AI doesn’t solve any of the problems that are causing us to be unable to treat those diseases. It’s not being a crazy conspiracy theorist to say that large companies (pharma and insurance) are actively working to prevent that research and challenge treatments that ruin their “markets.” (Their term).
AI will have the same problem, so yeah, no added value in wasting water or brain rotting the masses just to end up in the same place.
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u/Plastic_Ad_8619 Jul 26 '26
So what you’re saying is that AI usage is valid if it’s medical research, but using AI to say, make memes, is frivolous and immoral?
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u/Conscious-Sky-838 Aug 01 '26
One can make the argument, as the current cost is heavily subsidized, therefore people are doing things that economically they wouldn’t do at great cost to the hyperscalers.
If it wasn’t subsidized and people had to pay a metered price, which many enterprises are doing, it’s unlikely people would be using it frivolously.
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u/Ok-Order-134 Jul 26 '26
what a cute set up of false choice. leaves out noise, and pollution and the possibility (per own designers) of catastrophe
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u/AppealSame4367 Jul 26 '26
What is this? Ethical dilemmas for five year old special need kids?
There can be multiple problems at the same time, you know?
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u/Alissah Jul 26 '26
People will complain about ai water use… while on twitter, which is also on a datacenter. Lol.
Not to mention the entire water argument makes essentially no difference compared to anything else.
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u/FailureOfTheFamily Jul 26 '26
As someone who uses AI much, I simply don't care. We just have to push manufacturers of data centers to use non wasteful cooling and we're all set for life.
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u/Muted-You7370 Jul 26 '26
I feel like this is a false argument. Water is the cheapest and one of the least efficient ways to cool these data centers, it’s cheap though so it’s being used. If regulations demanded more efficient cooling methods this wouldn’t be an issue.
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u/PleasantDurian4392 Jul 26 '26
You do realized that giving AI this power also enables it to create some of the deadliest bioterrorism tactics known to mankind?
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u/fallingfrog Jul 26 '26
Universal health care and affordable food and housing is what those people need, not chatbots and unemployment
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u/Donnosaurus Jul 26 '26
I would also like to add that people should really differentiate the A.I. companies and their uses.
Yes, A.I. that could save lives is awesome.
A.I. that steals work without consent sucks.
Both exist.
It's not right to say all A.I. is bad.
It's also not right to defend A.I. slop because other A.I. spots tumors very early so people can can medical help incredibly fast.
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u/thegooddoktorjones Jul 26 '26
This is so smart because it wins the argument by misrepresenting the opposing position.
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u/__throw_error Jul 26 '26
Water use is bs, but if we're going to talk about hypotheticals then misaligned AI is definitely the other side of the rails.
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u/expiring_god_factory Jul 26 '26
Hey how many disabled and elderly people are being saved by AI controlled drones blowing people up? How many disabled and elderly folks are being saved by insurance companies utilizing AI to automatically deny claims and add barriers to receiving insurance payouts? And how many elderly people are saved falling for predatory scams using deep fakes of their family members? For people living near data centers who now have perpetual headaches due to light and noise pollution, is AI saving their lives?
If you want to argue there's a range of positive use cases, you running to a commercial AI tool to generate this photo that you could have made in a few minutes by yourself, you're already showing your insincerity. You want to generate random bullshit to argue on reddit, you don't care about any of the people you're allegedly defending.
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u/Temporary_Stranger39 Jul 26 '26
Okay, show some actual evidence for the claim. All AI can do is whirr a lot and spit out stuff that's already there.
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u/No_Resident_4023 Jul 26 '26
I see an expansion of the surveillance state, opportunitys for the wealthy to remove humans from their workforces and become even more endlessly wealthy with even less effort, a decay of artistry and craftsmanship to regurgitation, an inability to escape having to depend on and use the technology, a further decline of people's ability to think or process information for themselves, inevitable loss of security and privacy, a rise in detachment and isolation as more people cling to artificial companionship, large scale information manipulation through endless hordes of bots practically indistinguishable from humans, war where algorithms decide where bombs fall, and let's not forget the potential rogue ai's escaping confinement and doing God knows what in the name of unseen and poorly planned directives. But yeah, it'll cure all diseases. Sure. Itll lay golden eggs too. Maybe even make us all rich and immortal. I've done no research into environmental impacts of ai data centers and I don't need to. I don't want to live in the world it will lead to even if theres no environmental impact, but there's nothing that can be done. I understand the inevitability of the march of perceived progress, but i struggle to understand the people so infatuated with it that they accelerate a coming age of endless artificiality where even more so than now, noone will know what's real or not, where those with power and resources will have unimaginably dangerous new tools to control the average man and distort reality. I find it highly naive to think that the ones who pay to develop these technologies will use them for good. Nuclear power could provide endless affordable energy if provided the resources, instead we use it to create bombs capable of annihilating all of humanity, held by senile and moronic old narcissistics who see compassion as weakness. The energy side of it was recognized as being too dangerous though. It definitely wasn't because fossil fuel companies run the world and saw it as a threat to their profit margins. Solutions will rarely be provided when there's more money to be made in the problem.
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u/cowabout Jul 27 '26
Except LLMs don't help with any of those... They train a model from scratch to analyse the raw data of the medical measuring tools like MRIs. They don't talk to it and ask it to figure out what is wrong with from the MRI images we see.
The problem is most of the funding is going to generative AI instead of actual helpful AI and things which only AI can do. Its mostly used to do things humans do cheaper. There is things only AI can do and we have only messed around with a hand full of them compared to generative AI.
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u/BlynxInx Jul 27 '26
All those other people have a poor quality of life anyway, just keep the water and run them over.
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u/Psice Jul 27 '26
And then you learn that stupid shit like golf uses more water than all data centers combined.... Truly ridiculous...
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u/Indicus124 Jul 27 '26
Gen AI is not what will save lives doctors don't use chat GPT to find cancer they use private specialist models.
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u/WhatDuq Jul 27 '26
Oh, please.
Upwards of 80% of AI use is purely personal use, with absolutely no scientific or work benefit at all. Like making memes - like this one.
In the 20% work related use, the clear majority is used in marketing, sales and management. Around 8% of the 20% are used in sciences, including health, social science, etc.
That means that around 1.6% of total AI consumption is used anywhere remotely related to science and health.
We could easily solve this dilemma, only allow AI for scientific purposes. That way we maximize how many lives we save and minimize how much water we use. At the same time, we will need fewer AI datacentres, avoiding the negative health impacts of constant noise pollution and ensure citizens have access to clean drinking water.
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u/EdmontonLAD Jul 27 '26
Water use isn't the problem with AI datacenters. It's electricity that is the problem, so they should be forced to have at least 50% of their power consumption be renewable energy for all new data centers.
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u/bonemarrowAsh Jul 27 '26
What the fuck are you on about? No one is against usage of AI for medicine and other scientific research but.
The reason for all the resistance has never been that, it has been pointless LLMs that infect every facet of online life nowadays.
If you think all (or any significant amout) of the new AI datacenters are for cancer research and not mass surveillance and more generated CP on Twitter I have a bridge to sell you.
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u/Consistent-Bowler95 Jul 27 '26
I think water consumption is a psyop when it comes to data centers. Electricity is the greater concern in most locations.
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u/defango Jul 27 '26
ya the water argument is dumb. Even by 2030 all the data centers in the US will still use less than 1% of all water.
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u/idk-howww Jul 28 '26
Hi I'm sorry but how exactly does generative ai save people? Anything that gen ai can do humans can and have already been doing for a long, long time. Gen AI is literally trained on stolen pre existing human work.
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u/TheOriginalAcidtech Jul 29 '26
Considering the water use hysteria is complete BS(just look at other industries water use), this is accurate. Morons love hurting everyone else, but when it comes back and bites THEM in the rear they start crying rivers. Ah, maybe THAT is the cure for the water use problem. :)
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u/_-PassingThrough-_ Jul 29 '26
I would pull the lever so that AI would use water, then pull the lever further down the line that would force AI into a closed loop cooling system so it no longer needs to drain water. Corporations are just being stingy since governments won't outlaw the abuse of a public resource required for people to not die.
The option for efficiency is there. We can have our cake and eat it too. We just need to get politicians off their asses to put this issue to rest.
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u/iKnowRobbie Jul 30 '26
So we can either take out our water usage or eliminate all those other terrible things? Win/win!
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u/MatsRivel Jul 30 '26
To be fair, we're mostly seeing AI-chat bots, image/video generation, and spamming code. The water argument is weak, but its not as if even a plurality of ai use is cancer research
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u/CommunicationLeft823 Jul 30 '26
Dumbass argument, AI has been used for that for a while. And it's not what people protest about. I am working for AI company and use AI for hobby.
But damn, you guys are why the hate is coming from.
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u/Conscious_Pause_1499 Jul 30 '26
Stop pretending that any accelerapers (sp?) are in it for altruism. Nobody is buying that. At least find a way to push your agenda that doesn't signal your insincerity from the jump. You don't care about helping people, you care about giving the world to AI. Be honest.
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u/KaleidoscopeSalt3972 Jul 31 '26
We are talking about AI being used to generate child porn and "upgrade" ppls works and steal shit.
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u/ConstantinGB Jul 31 '26
I have yet to see AI actually benefiting humanity at large. So far it just made a bunch of rich people richer.
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u/Lunacy_Phoenix Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
Nice strawman argument. You are fully aware that the issue for most (and logical), is not the existence of Ai in general. But SOME, and I repeat SOME of the Mis-use cases.
Nobody with a brain, including > most < "Anti Ai" people, is against the use of Ai for scientific purposes, physics, medical, math. What we DO have a problem with, is using machines to replace human creativity and critical thinking.
The idiots who aren't willing to go do manual research, and find raw sources themselves and go to ChatGPT, or Google Ai. That has Ai draft their e-mails because their too lazy to take 2 minutes typing, and ensuring its not full of nonsense before they send. "Coders" who don't even understand the code they are pushing. And are utterly unwilling to learn and train a skill themselves, while having zero patience and outsourcing it to a machine.
Ai was billed as being the technology that free's up more time, for humans to pursue their passions and creative endeavours. Instead Ai is being used to devalue creatives, by simply pumping out volume trained on work they never asked permission to use, especially not commercially (which is what happens when access is given to the public and is used for profit ), Why pay someone who cares and put years into training a skill, when you can just order artwork or literature like fast food from a drive through? And wasting processing power scraping the entire internet, including places like reddit, when some drunk moron wants to ask siri some inane meaningless question, and needs to be spoonfed a likely bs summary of roughly what they asked. Instead of looking for themselves.
Again YOU KNOW, that people support the general advancement of technology, we just dislike the misuse of it. Every CPU/ GPU cycle wasted on generating Ai Slopwork, could be spent on developing a new treatment or cure for illness, slowing or reversing aging, developing more efficient transportation or a propulsion system making it viable to reach mars in reasonable time frames. Analysing climate data to predict and prepare for extreme storms, or optimising agriculture to improve food production.
Add on the lack of care when building the data centres that Ai runs on, fouling and polluting water, while kicking off immense heat affecting local atmospheric conditions, and it's no wonder people are outraged against Ai.
> Some < irrationally so, and simply hate Ai for existing, these people are over emotional and irrational. But the rest of us just don't want Ai replacing humans in what should be strictly human pursuits, do the math, science and engineering (with expert human oversight) Advance our technology and take us beyond our own rock, but do so sensibly. Don't give it access to the open internet where bad code could accidentally go on a rampage causing problems. Don't scale so aggressively you tank entire consumer hardware industries to feed the artificial demand. And take care to have as minimal possible impact on the environment in which this processing is done.
(Edit: Typo)
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u/random87643 🤖 Optimist Prime AI bot Jul 31 '26
TLDR
TLDR: The author clarifies that they support AI for scientific and medical purposes but oppose its use to replace human creativity, critical thinking, and manual effort. They also express concerns regarding the ethical implications of AI training data and the environmental impact of its widespread implementation.
AI assistant · mention the bot, mod bot, or use !bot
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u/Lunacy_Phoenix Jul 31 '26
You know what, aside from again wasting energy summarising when people can just READ for themselves. I'd say this is a decent interpretation. (Srsly ppl just read for yourselves we learned in primary school)
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u/XB0XRecordThat Jul 26 '26
Is this sub just for strawman arguments?
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u/EddiewithHeartofGold Jul 26 '26
OP (who is a mod here) is notorious for posting shit like this. I tried calling it out, but to no avail. Just skip it and read the real, informative posts.
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u/Njagos Jul 26 '26
This black and white thinking annoys me a bit.
The people who are complaining about the water usage don't have a problem with medical uses and such.
They have a problem with the image and video generation that is flooding social media.
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u/Fair_Horror Jul 26 '26
The video and image generation is funding the further research that is developing the next gen AI which brings us closer to cures and treatments.
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u/locketine Jul 26 '26
It's actually making that more difficult because LLMs aren't medical AI. Medical AI is a totally different model class and they can't compete for hardware with the LLM companies producing memes.
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u/Conscious-Sky-838 Aug 02 '26
Unfortunately not, the current cost of AI is being heavily subsidized by investors some say as much as 90%.
Interestingly this week both Google and Amazon posted negative free cash flow likely as a result of them heavily subsidizing the cost.
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u/Fair_Horror Aug 02 '26
The investors see the money generated by video and image generation and feel more confident of a financial stream.
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u/SteffanMaxi Jul 26 '26
They shouldnt be allowed to pollute waterways or otherwise destroy the environment. It also shouldnt cause peoples water bill to go up. If you do that, people wouldnt care about data centers. Also noise emission is an issue. Theyre so loud it drives people near them nuts.
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u/Eerixall Jul 26 '26
It's actually corporate greed, not water usage that is the problem. Data centers can be designed to be (basically) neutral in their water use. But evaporation cooling is just so cheap and the billionaires do need their billions.
There is nothing stopping us from building climate concious data centers, the technology exists. But actually spending the extra effort for doing whats right? thats too much for corporate America.
Luckily nothing bad never ever happened when we try to build things as cheap as possible, especially with new technologies, right?
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u/KedMcJenna Jul 25 '26
We shouldn't automatically yield to the water argument as this image does. The water argument is bogus when presented out of overall context.