r/Anticonsumption • u/Sad_Butterscotch7063 • 2d ago

Discussion Does anyone avoid using ChatGPT because of its water usage?

Hey, I recently came across something about how using ChatGPT, Blackbox AI and similar AI tools actually consumes a surprising amount of water (cooling data centers, I guess). Made me wonder, have people here stopped or reduced using it because of that?

Curious how others are thinking about it in terms of sustainability and personal impact.

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u/botella36 2d ago

I am sure it is much less. AI is extremely compute intensive. Posting reddit comments does not really require a measurable amount of processing

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u/B99fanboy 2d ago

All this traffic needs to be routed and it is compute intensive.

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u/ZeeMastermind 2d ago

You know, this is a good point. Especially when you consider all the ads/trackers in the background (which also have to be routed), any back-end database stuff, etc. I would be curious how it stands up compared to a BBS forum or even lemmy.

Posting one comment probably isn't more compute-intensive than asking ChatGPT one question, but I'm not sure how you would find out the specifics.