• Archpawn@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    Yeah. A gallon of water might not sound like much, but it adds up. If you generate two images a day for a year, it’s as bad as eating a whole cheeseburger. Assuming the gallon is accurate and not an exaggeration.

    • chuckleslord@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      Dude, push the anti-meat shit elsewhere. AI is something that is causing new, extreme damage for literally no benefit. You’re not going to convince anyone by attacking other movements.

      Also, I’m a vegetarian, go bark up a different tree.

      • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        The point isn’t being anti-meat, it’s perspective. The water consumption of AI is completely negligible compared to literally every other facet of our consumption and really isn’t worth using to demonstrate how bad AI is.

        AI’s consumption of electricity, on the other hand…

        • chuckleslord@lemmy.world
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          14 hours ago

          It’s a tangible example that you can use to demonstrate the absolute waste to someone. Yeah, it’s less water waste than electricity waste, but people can’t visualize the amount of electricity being used and have that be a concrete thing in their mind. Pouring out a gallon of water is an immediately identifiable thing. And the point is to make people associate the absolute reckless waste with the use of ai.

          • Allero@lemmy.today
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            9 hours ago

            Pouring out a gallon of water is an immediately identifiable thing

            Yes, as in “you can impress people with that”, no, as in “it gives any sort of accurate perception”

            There are plenty of things that consume orders of magnitude more water than AI. You’ll be much better off ecologically by skipping the last few seconds of your shower or eating a tiny slice of meat less every week than by not using these tools.

            Besides, many of them can be run on your regular, air-cooled PC.

            That’s not to say that AI training in general is not an ecological issue - but most of it actually goes in directions other than LLMs and image generation tools, and for models already trained, the footprint is straight up negligible. You likely wasted more energy reading this than getting an AI to make an image for you.

          • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
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            9 hours ago

            Yeah, but that one bottle is dwarfed by the 600 gallons for one cheeseburger. That’s the point I, and the previous poster, are trying to make.

            I hear what you’re saying, I just disagree on the effectiveness of the image I guess.