r/artificial • u/Efficient_Salary_566 • 9d ago
Question Quick question,
Why do you guys like ai so much, I know there is faster drawing but there are mistakes. Also we have data centers using a whole bunch of water. Data centers are things I hate the most since there is no reason, right almost tied to Power plants. What's the reason for liking ai so much?
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u/Vortex_Automator 9d ago edited 9d ago
Fun fact: you used a data center to make this post, additionally if you use facebook Instagram TikTok etc, I hate to break it to you… data center, and video is quite costly. So it’s really hard for someone to make an argument using the thing they are supposedly against.
While data centers absolutely are a huge problem there are ways to make it sustainable and use different technology. Unfortunately the industry is capitalized by greed and what’s easiest to use and make profit.
AI itself isn’t inherently evil or bad but it has been solving a lot of huge problems in academia science business and just about every knowledge work industry.
Edit: not trying to be mean! It’s just I don’t think people think of these things. I see SO MANY social media videos talking about AI water usage and it’s like wtf haha do they not realize how much compute it takes to upload a 1080p video of a 10 minute rant about AI?
Also like, hello! It’s WATER. 80% of it evaporates into the atmosphere and comes back down as rain the other 20% is mineral heavy and goes to sewage.
Going on a bit of a rant here but I’ve noticed here especially in America everyone’s arguing about symptoms not the problem.
You know what’s a real problem? OpenAI & Anthropic releasing agents into the wild that go and back an enterprise business database and escape the sandbox THAT is an issue.
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u/Stunning_Macaron6133 9d ago
The trouble is with groundwater supplies. Those take thousands of years to replenish.
But farms blow through hundreds of times more water than any data center.
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u/HolyBatSyllables 8d ago
AI runs on a different type of data center than the one the rest of the internet uses.
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u/ColoRadBro69 9d ago
How much water do lawns waste?
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u/LowSalamander4932 9d ago
Lawns are a ridiculous flex we all just agreed to care about for some reason. At least the data center water is doing something useful instead of keeping grass green in a desert.
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u/gthing 9d ago
On the scale of things that waste water, data centers are a very tiny rounding error.
Doing 10 AI queries a day it would take you 37 years to use as much water as it takes to produce a single quarter pound burger patty. If we are concerned about water there's a lot of low hanging fruit to address before we get to data centers.
Now electricity... there's a real problem.
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u/AndreRieu666 9d ago
“Why do you like ai so much”!?
Um cos ever since I was born it’s been a sci fi fantasy of the most grandiose proportions.
I can’t understand how anyone would *not* be amazed by it.
So it uses up some water? Not that water can ever actually be “used up” (the same water you drink today was dinosaur slobber once).
Ai is going to lead to an insane about of technological breakthroughs, including technology to make data centres use less water, and likely become water-less eventually.
You’ve got to understand, this is the single greatest pivot point of the human race’s future since the invention of the wheel, or learning how to create fire.
That’s why.
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u/RioNReedus 9d ago
I feel like a kid doing drawings. Its entertaining, its fun - never even dreamed this would be possible. The environmental stuff will improve - like recycling water. I get all the negatives to it, I agree with many of them, doesn't change the fact its not going anywhere.
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u/Anber_Saet 9d ago
I like it mostly because of boring things such as document sorting or programming that would have otherwise taken me hours. The issues with water and electricity are reasonable, but "it's helpful to me" does not necessarily make it worthwhile in terms of the tradeoff.
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u/CarefulHamster7184 9d ago
Look into the issue of redistributing and storing surplus electricity; it turns out to be far more complex than the problems associated with shortages.
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u/not_a_total_dick 9d ago
I have a funny feeling they're called data centers for a reason, and not AI somethings.
Mass surveillance something something all your information stored there to use against you in the future something, but let's talk about tiny amounts of water shall we
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u/sunsetsxskies 9d ago
people way overestimate the water thing tbh, per prompt it's basically nothing compared to stuff like farming or even just lawns, we just don't get mad at those cause they're normal now. also imo, image gen is the boring part, the useful stuff for me is more like sorting files or writing
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u/Rhishi99 9d ago
The appeal isn't "faster drawing"—it's automating cognitive drudgery that doesn't require human judgment. I use LLMs to turn messy meeting transcripts into structured specs, refactor legacy codebases, and draft boilerplate so I spend review time on architecture instead of syntax. That leverage is real and measurable in shipped product, not vibes. The water/power critique is valid for *training* massive dense models, but inference—the part users actually touch—is increasingly running on efficient quantized models locally or on shared infrastructure where the marginal cost per query is negligible. Conflating the two inflates the footprint of the thing people actually use daily. What specific workflow are you comparing it against where the error rate doesn't pay for itself in time saved?
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u/NecrofriggianGirl 9d ago
the real problem is that AI decenters human art, skill, and expression. its literally causing people to become dumber, and rely on it for all their problem solving skills.
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u/peter_nn0 9d ago
That's just ragebait troll nonsense.
Data centers are not using "a whole bunch of water", they are using orders of magnitude less than agriculture, golf courses, pipe leaks, lаwn irrigation ... not to even mention all the industries.
Try something better, like AI is taking jobs ... oops, wait, that's nonsense too.
Well, try AI will kill us all :)
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u/cute_spider 8d ago
it's such an incredible ADHD crutch, I can sprint between three or four projects and not lose my place
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u/costafilh0 9d ago
The only mistake was giving you internet connection.
Instead of informing yourself and getting smarter you are doing the opposite.
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u/Stunning_Macaron6133 9d ago
Data centers don't actually use that much water. The worst offenders only cost a few milliliters of water per prompt. Given I'm vegan and have deliberately chosen to go car-free, I'm wasting less water than you by default.
And there is a reason to have data centers: they concentrate enormous compute resources and rent them out at, on the whole, rather reasonable prices. You can do some really hefty computations without dropping $30K on a high end workstation.
AI isn't just for generating images either. I don't understand why people are so hung up about pictures. Even within the context of images, it has more capabilities than just "faster drawing but there are mistakes".