In the 4-5 years that some people have been using GenAI to poorly do their jobs for them, they could have just gone back to school to get a degree in trying to solve whatever problem they're working on. And it would not have cost the environment so much.
#AI #water #techsustainability
(A good book on this topic is Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford. So much more than water is wasted on this HoT nEw TeChNoLoGy. Corporations are just out to make a buck with no real goal for their software use in mind. Machine learning in medicine and for legitimate assistive technologies is one thing. Extracting data and life-sustaining water away from every living thing is another.)

Writing a single 100-word email with ChatGPT consumes approximately the volume of a standard bottle of water, the global infrastructure processing AI queries is projected to use the equivalent of half the United Kingdom's annual water withdrawal by 2027, and much of that water is being drawn from regions already experiencing severe drought.
The figure for a single email comes from a 2025 peer-reviewed paper in Communications of the ACM by Pengfei Li, Shaolei Ren, and colleagues at the University of California, Riverside. The paper, titled “Making AI Less Thirsty,” sets out the methodology by which the per-query water footprint of large language models can be estimated. The […]

