this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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Whether you use AI, think it's a "fun stupid thing for memes", or even ignore it, you should know it's already polluting worse than global air travel. (archive.is)
submitted 17 hours ago by Reygle@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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archive.is link to article from allabout.ai at https://www.allaboutai.com/resources/ai-statistics/ai-environment/

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[โ€“] Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 11 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

OP, this statement is bullshit. you can do about 5 million requests for ONE flight.

i'm gonna quote my old post:

I had the discussion regarding generated CO2 a while ago here, and with the numbers my discussion partner gave me, the calculation said that the yearly usage of ChatGPT is appr. 0.0017% of our CO2 reduction during the covid lockdowns - chatbots are not what is kiling the climate. What IS killing the climate has not changed since the green movement started: cars, planes, construction (mainly concrete production) and meat.

The exact energy costs are not published, but 3Wh / request for ChatGPT-4 is the upper limit from what we know (and thats in line with the appr. power consumption on my graphics card when running an LLM). Since Google uses it for every search, they will probably have optimized for their use case, and some sources cite 0.3Wh/request for chatbots - it depends on what model you use. The training is a one-time cost, and for ChatGPT-4 it raises the maximum cost/request to 4Wh. That's nothing. The combined worldwide energy usage of ChatGPT is equivalent to about 20k American households. This is for one of the most downloaded apps on iPhone and Android - setting this in comparison with the massive usage makes clear that saving here is not effective for anyone interested in reducing climate impact, or you have to start scolding everyone who runs their microwave 10 seconds too long.

Even compared to other online activities that use data centers ChatGPT's power usage is small change. If you use ChatGPT instead of watching Netflix you actually safe energy!

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Water is about the same, although the positioning of data centers in the US sucks. The used water doesn't disappear tho - it's mostly returned to the rivers or is evaporated. The water usage in the US is 58,000,000,000,000 gallons (220 Trillion Liters) of water per year. A ChatGPT request uses between 10-25ml of water for cooling. A Hamburger uses about 600 galleons of water. 2 Trillion Liters are lost due to aging infrastructure . If you want to reduce water usage, go vegan or fix water pipes.

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Read up here !

[โ€“] Reygle@lemmy.world 1 points 27 minutes ago

If you only include chat bots, your numbers look good. Sadly reality isn't in "chat bots".