this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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AI’s excessive water consumption threatens to drown out its environmental contributions, researchers say (theconversation.com)
submitted 8 months ago by 0x815@feddit.de to c/climate
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Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10267315

Initial research shows that AI has a significant water footprint. It uses water both for cooling the servers that power its computations and for producing the energy it consumes. As AI becomes more integrated into our societies, its water footprint will inevitably grow.

The growth of ChatGPT and similar AI models has been hailed as “the new Google.” But while a single Google search requires half a millilitre of water in energy, ChatGPT consumes 500 millilitres of water for every five to 50 prompts.

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[–] 0x815@feddit.de 1 points 8 months ago

@NABDad

Yes, I know. I don't say it's all bad. It improves human decision making in a lot of things. What I meant is that it has been doing also a lot of harm in the last few years, e.g., in the U.S. where insurer UnitedHealth allegedly used an AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, or in The Netherlands and in France, just to name examples. And I'm afraid this is just the tip of the iceberg

But I'd agree that it's not the technologies, it's the way we humans use them.