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 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.
Cali?
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 uninhabitance
Solidarity brother
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
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.