To feed your food preferences:
AI: ~560–800 Billion Liters Annual usage
Beef: ~4,387 Trillion Liters (for feed alone)
AI: Minimal land use
Beef: 44% of global habitable land
AI: ~20,400 tons CO2 (per large model)
Beef: ~14.5% of all global emissions
AI: Electronic waste, local heat islands
Beef: Methane, manure runoff, “dead zones”
A single quarter-pound beef burger requires between 40 and 70 gallons of surface/groundwater
A heavy AI user (50 queries/day for a year) consumes roughly 14 to 48 gallons of water annually
Beef driven industrial agriculture is the #1 driver of global deforestation. In the Amazon, cattle ranching is responsible for at least 75% of forest loss. This is causing ecological collapse.
All this to torture cows. Fucking stop it. Stop it NOW.
The amount of land use is staggering also:
I have a ton of similar vegan infographics. If you want I could make a
vegan_infographicscommunity on your server.the economic pressure to destroy the environment in my country comes, among other things, in great part from international demand for beef.
Você é brasileiro?
eu facilitei bastante né
I just want people to stop caring about water usage as a metric for environmental destruction by just listing an amount in liters. Its so much more complicated than that. What water are they using? Is it ultra clean or brown water? Where are they sourcing the water from? Are they taking it from a pretine natural spring in a rainforest or are they taking it from the ocean?
There are just so many veriables that its almost never an apples to apples comparison.
Carbon emmissions, detriment to workers and other things like that are much better metrics. I just hate when people say “did you know you empty a kajillion olympic sized swimming pools with every ai queory?”
Water where I live is a non renewable resource and is being drained from ancient aquifers at an alarming rate. Once it is gone we essentially have to leave this entire region and it is being drained for ranching and growing alfalfa.
Thats a pretty big yikes.
Assuming we live in the same region West Asia, then I fully agree and it’s refreshing to see someone worry about this too here… AI, climate change and meat industry is catastrophic and will straight up destroy our region and force us all out, all in the name of treats and capitalism
I hope we get to live to see us make a 180 (through a breakthrough, revolution or just capitalism crumbling) and save us from the brink of uninhabitanceSolidarity brother
Cali?
I want people to stop assuming that simplified framing of a complex issue is the whole story.
Volume of water is an easy metric for people to understand. When people talk about wasting water they might mean literally moving water out of its water shed, like groundwater wells being pumped dry or they might also be thinking of the massive amounts of energy required to move and potentially treat that water and the (heat, nutrient) pollution the used water carries.
These impacts are not universal and which ones apply in which locations, and the impact they have will vary widely. So volume of water is an easy way to make it easier to understand and ‘smooth’ out the variations.
Water usage for beef’s cattle feed in the US at least is quite often in water scarce areas
Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle-feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs
Thank you, that is an interesting point that actually shows the environmental destruction caused by beefs water usage.
AI gives workers PTSD by forcing them to review horrific images.
Beef gives workers PTSD by forcing them to kill, over and over.
Is there research of the psychological effects of butchering animals?
There is indeed
There is evidence that slaughterhouse employment is associated with lower levels of psychological well-being. SHWs [slaughterhouse workers] have described suffering from trauma, intense shock, paranoia, anxiety, guilt and shame (Victor & Barnard, 2016), and stress (Kristensen, 1991). There was evidence of higher rates of depression (Emhan et al., 2012; Horton & Lipscomb, 2011; Hutz et al., 2013; Lander et al., 2016; Lipscomb et al., 2007), anxiety (Emhan et al., 2012; Hutz et al., 2013; Leibler et al., 2017), psychosis (Emhan et al., 2012), and feelings of lower self-worth at work (Baran et al., 2016). Of particular note was that the symptomatology appeared to vary by job role. Employees working directly with the animals (e.g., on the kill floor or handling the carcasses) were those who showed the highest prevalence rates of aggression, anxiety, and depression (Hutz et al., 2013; Richards et al., 2013).
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15248380211030243
Or for more qualitative research with quotes from slaughterhouse workers on effects
Thank you, that’s super fascinating. The way that people who work in the industry talk about animals is very unsettling, they have really convinced themselves that animals can’t feel the pain they inflict on them. So I had assumed that they had completely reduced animals to objects in their mind. Knowing that ptsd is common is somewhat relieving because it means that fully objectifying living beings cannot happen without consequences.
I’ve seen this argument used to justify the environmental impact of AI. Shit’s gross
I think the point is that people play the environmental argument selectively when they could make a bigger impact by reducing their meat meat consumption or even quitting altogether, assuming their body can function well on a different diet.
If we’re talking about actual solutions, AI’s biggest issues come from who owns it, who controls its expansion and who suffers from the negative impacts. It’s capitalism rather than the tool itself.
Datacenters have always been an environmental concern and I feel like AI has highlighted the larger issue that old tech nerds have been yelling about for over a decade, people are not using the computer sitting right in front of them and instead using some other mystical computer out in the “cloud”.
If everyone was using shitty little 8b param llms on their own hardware vs the 200b param llms on the “cloud” the environmental impact would not only be more spread out, but also in general consume far less energy.
Preaching to the choir.
This landed on the all and local feeds of one of the largest lemmy instances for over a day, I think it served its purpose
deleted by creator
Data centres don’t fill local waterways with nitrates either.
Beef can’t be replaced by any other food.
It is hard to replicate the cruelty of the dairy/beef industry, I’ll give you that.
our planet can’t be replaced either, so which is more important to you?
How so?
Besides all the vegans, vegetarians, and people who can’t afford or don’t have access to beef, there are roughly 1.2 billion Hindus in the world, most of whom don’t eat beef for religious reasons.
I don’t see how beef can be irreplaceable when literally billions of people don’t eat beef and are perfectly healthy without it.
Beef is fucking poison for your body and the planet.
We have many alternatives to meat that are delicious and satiating. It’s one of the best things we can do for the planet. It’s not easy for everyone to easily cut themselves off from eating meat but it would be great if people start reducing it.
Lol
Cows eat plants, which becomes beef, so categorically false.
We can’t digest the grasses that cows do with their 4 stomachs and rumination, so that argument is bull. But of course you’re right that beef can replaced. We’ll just have to hit the legumes and plants that we can actually digest.
If only there was some other way of preparing food making it more digestible and its nutrients more available without us needing 4 stomachs 🤔
Of course there is. I’m just saying that the existence of cows doesn’t prove anything, since they are a different organism from us with different capabilities, like digesting things that we can’t. Using bullshit arguments doesn’t help whatever cause you think you’re helping.
My point was more about the plants than the cows, any nutrient in beef being ultimately derived from plants. And we may not have 4 stomachs but have other ways of accessing those nutrients. Maybe that clarifies somewhat 🤷🏼
@Aristotelis @hamid old school trolling
Conversely, no one needs AI. That could be stopped without any modification to people’s diet and the logistical changes that would require.
Its a “low hanging fruit”
This make me almost feel good with AI
Now seriously leaving meat is all advantages with general health
I don’t order my beef from Amazon though.
The truth is that this poster is obnoxious and posts obvious flame bait.
They get ratioed on almost everything they post because no one buys what they are selling.
My instance doesn’t display downvotes so I don’t see it if that’s true.
Even if your flesh isn’t shipped from there, the feed for the animals you kill will have been.
Beef is exported from Brazil to the rest of the world
As an Australian I could argue my beef isnt from Brazil. I don’t really eat it because afaik it’s the worst of all the meats, but it’s definitely local produce.
Australia also has plenty of deforestation problems from the beef industry. The deforestation is by no means exclusive to Brazil
Forests around the world are cleared to make way for cattle destined for your dinner plate.
And Australia is no different.
More than half the continent is used for grazing livestock. And most deforestation happens on Australian cattle farms
The deforestation on farms that ‘people don’t even know’ is happening
That’s fair, there’s plenty of deforestation in Australia for a bunch of stupid shit, even illegal logging gets tolerated.
