Ooze 𓁟 on Nostr: If I was to rage block you I could never understand you. "The carbon footprint of AI ...

If I was to rage block you I could never understand you.

"The carbon footprint of AI systems alone could be between 32.6 and 79.7 million tons of CO2 emissions in 2025, while the water footprint could reach 312.5–764.6 billion L. To put this into perspective, this is in the same range as the carbon footprint of New York City (52.2 million tons of CO2 emissions in 202327)" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666389925002788

So, yes a small percentage of total global CO2 emissions at this stage, but still a whole New York of emissions. At this stage adding any more CO2 emissions is a fantastically bad idea. We need to reduce them massively and immediately. And yet that is not the extent of the environmental hazard. The water usage is nearly a third of a Warragamba dam's worth. Large parts of the planet are experiencing massive droughts. Using this much water for LLMs seems a ludicrous idea.

But there are still other harms. Data centres create heat islands which raise the temperature by 2°C on average where more than 340 million people could be affected by this temperature increase. https://arxiv.org/html/2603.20897

It is a false equivalence to compare movie piracy and the wholesale scraping of all human knowledge to train LLMs because 99% of those who pirate movies aren't doing it to sell the pirated versions. LLMs are taking the work of us all and then selling back to us. It is far from free. You mentioned paying $170 per month to buy access to Claude. Most of thew planet cannot afford that. Yet even those who can never afford it have had their work stolen to train it.

Not only are they damaging to the planet but they are damages to our minds. There is now a lot of research showing how harmful LLM use is to cognitive function. "LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI’s role in learning." https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872. This is having effects in the employment market already as employers find students who used LLMs through their entire degrees end up unfit for employment. .https://futurism.com/future-society/college-critical-thinking-ai

Lastly, it comes across as super patronising when you presume people are not informed about what they talking about. I am presently writing a submission for a government inquiry into LLMs. I am happy to engage with reasoned debate supported by research.