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/mmelectronic 2d ago

I don’t think the water is “consumed” per se, it kinda circulates to a cistern that has a chiller in it to regulate the water temperature, even if they were vaporizing it to steam it’s never really consumed, it turns into rain.

I work closely with industrial cooling, so I’ve seen a few different systems, the intent is to keep the system “closed loop”

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u/slktrx 2d ago

I've worked in data centers a bunch. This is accurate for at least the ones I've been in. The water is a closed loop, like a home's furnace.

This is not to excuse the energy usage, though

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u/Lycent243 2d ago

The water issue is just a red herring. Data processing uses and lot of energy and makes a lot of heat, which is the real issue.

But the reality, that ChatGPT and other AI are just distractions as well...no one in this sub has stopped using reddit, which also uses a lot of energy and generates a lot of heat waste. It's a lot easier to fight that battles that makes us feel good but don't require any real life changes.

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u/TemporaryAny6371 2d ago

Energy usage has to be weighed against benefits. Users should be informed of true cost per second used, make our judgements from there.

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u/Lycent243 2d ago

Right, I'd love to see the total environmental impact of Reddit and then divide that by, for example, the benefit that we get to see whether or not people are overreacting to their wife's boyfriend sleeping with their sisters husband's mother hundreds of posts per minute about how people feel about American politics. and then some posts on r/Anitconsumption and others.

Unfortunately, the vast, vast, majority of the posts and comments are not actually beneficial to society and are addictive in order that Reddit can drive ad revenue.

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u/TemporaryAny6371 2d ago

Yeah, a lot of it is for people's entertainment.

I don't think reddit is the most offensive when it comes to ad revenue. There are social media platforms that shove ads right into our faces.

I agree though. Ads use a lot of network bandwidth. Sometimes it feels like more than half our cell phone data limits is used for ads.

Our world revolves around ads, it has too much power over us. Even if a lot of us ignore the ads, they still send it to us. Who knows, those ads may be the real reason for over consumption and water/energy usage.

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u/Lycent243 2d ago

I would say that overconsumption in general (consuming all the media, buying all the products) is definitely a massive reason for overconsumption of water and energy. And general overconsumption is absolutely built around ads telling us what to buy and why we will be a sad pathetic loser if we don't.

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u/wojtek30 2d ago

Finally someone with an understanding of cooling, the water isn’t wasted it’s just being pumped at that speed. Or worst case it’s being taken from a river and deposited back into the river

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u/mmelectronic 2d ago

The kind of stuff I work on its easier to filter captive water than use outdoor water, but I’ve heard of old school factories that basically have a dam onsite and use gravity to feed through, million ways to skin that cat I would assume.

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u/TonyJZX 1d ago

the thing is OP is deluded because so many things that sustain our lives revolves around massive use of water

your beverage and food manufacturing blasts away tons megaliters millions of gallons

thats before you get into durables manufacturing

as far as AI goes... its all about its incredible use of electricity just like crypto

OP should be more concerned of the fact that Microsoft and Oracle want to blast away $500 bn on new nvidia datacenters - this is how this is in the short term.

AI wlll move forward with new technology that will eventually use a fraction of the power.

Further to this it is possible to host your own local AI - I use an old server to run my own deepseek server.

I turn it on when needed.

There's always a way if you are so inclined.

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u/acanthostegaaa 2d ago

People are so desperate to find any reason to hate LLM's it's hilarious. "THEY'RE USING ALL THE WATER" is a new one but I'm not surprised.

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u/AlemSiel 1d ago edited 1d ago

I believe this is a good summary of the resources used on AI. "Should you feel guilty about using AI?"

The water is just the easiest to track. But works as a proxy. AI is useful! But thinking about how we adopt it is also necessary. And not disregard the potential and measurable harm they could do.

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u/acanthostegaaa 1d ago

I'm gonna be real, I don't need to watch that because I've already decided the answer for me is "no".

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u/AlemSiel 1d ago

Oh, ok. Mind if I ask why? I also use AI, but being mindful of it's downsides could be useful? Why is better not to think about it?

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u/acanthostegaaa 1d ago

Because it's not on us to fix anything. The waste comes from the top and it is so laughably immense that there is no one single thing that any of us could do to mitigate it.

Look up the insane amount of pollution it causes just to ship oil back and forth across the world. There's nothing anyone could do, meaningfully, to counteract that.

We are as fleas living on the back of a dying animal, and its owner is the one poisoning it, not us.

(Yeah, I'm posting this in the wrong sub for it, sorry.)

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u/AlemSiel 1d ago

That makes so much sense!!! Thank you for sharing it with me. I still believe we should regulate it and be mindful and all that crap. It harms a lot of people as much as it helps. But all of that should be held in mind with "true change". Our consumption of AI or anything is neoliberal crap. What matters more is systemic change. Not how much we use AI or not. You are right and I will keep that in mind!

However, I still believe we can do both. Even if at the individual level what we do is less impactful. We can consume less, be less wasteful, alongside advocating for change. And being informed of what we do. Our behaviours impact the ones of the people we share our lives with. It also matters.

Then again, thanks for enlightening me! I get sad when I feel we don't care. And you do care! Arguably, about what is more important.

(Why is this the wrong sub o:?)

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u/acanthostegaaa 1d ago

I'm not really an "anticonsumption" guy because of my aforementioned reasons, so I'm a bit out of place here. Systemic change is the only option, and I don't believe in shifting the blame onto the consumer when the production of every single piece of faff and tat is what's strangling our planet. They produce whether we buy or not.

But you're right, I do very much care about companies overharvesting our planet's resources just to make ugly Funko pops out of precious, irretrievabale minerals and polymers. I just think "don't buy a Funko" isn't the answer, it should be "Funko Co. needs to be heavily regulated and limited in the amount of ugly dolls they produce and are allowed to sell" for example...

And to tie it back into AI, if they really want to protect the environment against its overuse, there needs to be a regulation against it. "X Company can only use Y amount of kilowatt-hours per Z time period (or amount of fuel)" is the only solution, not "X consumer should only proompt twice a day because it's killing dolphins :(" The consumer is not the one killing the dolphin here.

Good talk, thanks for being receptive to my commentary.

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u/mmelectronic 2d ago

Isn’t rising ocean water a big problem? We need to store like 100000 cubic kilometers of water in cooling systems to make a dent in sea level rise. Not promoting AI per se, but water isn’t the issue.

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u/AlemSiel 1d ago edited 1d ago

It is just a proxy of other environmental en energy "costs" but even then, depending on where they are deployed, they deplete the water in the soil, and that could have a measurable impact there.

AI is useful. But we have to think about how we deploy it!

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u/acanthostegaaa 2d ago

It's like people see "water usage" and then go "OH NO MUH DRINKIES" forgetting that most of our planet is covered in water we cannot drink.

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u/Wendigo_6 2d ago

Reminds me of when a neighbor found out I worked in the paper industry and tried lecturing to me that they buy bamboo toilet paper because it’s more sustainable and doesn’t cause deforestation.

That day, my neighbor learned about tree farms.

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u/tuckedfexas 2d ago

Like the people in the US that panic bought toilet paper during covid. Australia was concerned cause they get some amount (can’t remember numbers) of their TP through China but the US imports very little of it from China.

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u/nawvay 2d ago

I had this argument with someone on IG. People don’t understand closed loop systems lol. They clearly missed their middle school science class regarding matter.

Their argument was “well what if the water was taken from a place that needed it to be put in the loop” and well… what if it wasn’t? LOL

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u/sittingathomeloudly 2d ago

I appreciate your insight on this, but I worry that people may see your comment and think that there’s a lot of hullabaloo over nothing because of it. So I’d like to point out that there’s way more to the environmental impact than what happens to the water. There’s electronic pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, electricity consumption, and in the worst cases, community displacement. And more, but I’m not here to write a research paper. The whole picture on the negative environmental impact of AI is much bigger than water usage and whether or not it’s actually “consumed”. I think this is important to keep in mind when we discuss AI

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u/Baycon 2d ago

Absolutely. Except that’s the OP’s main and pretty much only concern. Dumb stuff should be debunked to make room for important facts, IMO.

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u/sittingathomeloudly 2d ago

Totally agree! Its important to know what actually happens to the water like this commenter explains, bc there’s things that are more cause for alarm that don’t get the same attention

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u/mmelectronic 2d ago

Oh yeah my 2 main concerns are power usage, and the use of AI as a buzz word to disingenuously use to raise VC finding.

Water capture is almost a public good at this point.