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.
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.