In the late 2000s there was a push by a lot of businesses to not print emails and people use to add a ‘Please consider this environment before printing this email.’
Considering how bad LLMs/‘ai’ are with power consumption and water usage a new useless tag email footer should be made.
The thing is: those AI datacenters are used for a lot of things, LLM’s usage amount to about 3% of usage, the rest is for stuff like image analysis, facial recognition, market analysis, recommendation services for streaming platforms and so on. And even the water usage is not really the big ticket item:
The issue of placement of data centers is another discussion, and i agree with you that placing data centers in locations that are not able to support them is bullshit. But people seem to simply not realize that everything we do has a cost. The US energy system uses 58 trillion gallons of water in withdrawals each year. ChatGPT use about 360 million liters/year, which comes down to 0.006% of Americas water usage / year. An average american household uses about 160 gallons of water / day; ChatGPT requests use about 20-50 ml/request. If you want to save water, go vegan or fix water pipes.