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The environmental impact of generative AI is largely overblown. You could make thousands of queries to a service like ChatGPT for a similar amount of water that's consumed to make a single hamburger, and this assumes the datacenter is using evaporative cooling.

Its not overblown because every single person is making thousands of queries every single day whether they want to or not because the tech is forced into every device and runs the queries regardless of whether youre even looking at them.

Not to mention, at least when you make a hamburger you get calories and nutrients out of it. What do you get out of a thousand generative AI queries? Especially considering most of them arent even necessary, and many of them are riddled with errors.

Please provide evidence that everyone's device is making thousands of queries autonomously. This just sounds like hyperbolic nonsense.

Pretty insane how much people have moved past the environmental cost and effects because annoying people posted a certain study that got "debunked" but then you hear the stories of it poisoning water and communities

Or how much water it used but then you get whataboutism of everything else that uses water and don't know what to tell people but that also ain't good I live in the southwest and water sources are getting fucking smaller and smaller and our states portion of water getting cut

its weird seeing people bring up golf courses and the excess of corn monocrops like people don't also complain about those being big wastes of water/land Like yeah there's already a bunch of dumb shit diverting water away from people, we don't need more shit when we could literally just not do that

Look, I don't disagree but you just called it error-prone under your own hypothetical where it was error-free.