archive.is link to article from allabout.ai at https://www.allaboutai.com/resources/ai-statistics/ai-environment/
Yeah, AI is shit and a massive waste of energy, but it’s NOTHING compared to the energy usage of the airline industry.
Friend, did you actually follow the link? Maybe just read the pictures?
Just because something has a pretty infographic doesn’t make it true.
Picked at random, It also claims this:
Why does nighttime AI use burn dirtier energy? Fossil fuel dominance: Coal and gas supply up to 90% of overnight electricity. Solar drop-off: Solar disappears after sunset, while wind delivers only ~30% capacity at night. Peak carbon hours: Between 2–4 AM, grid intensity rises to 450–650 gCO₂/kWh, compared to 200–300 gCO₂/kWh in the afternoon.
This is complete bullshit in the UK, where energy is greenest in the small hours of the night when demand is low and the wind turbines are still turning. Least green and most expensive is late afternoon and evening, when energy usage spikes.
Let me reiterate. AI is crap. AI is a massive waste of energy, but your website has its calculations off in terms of order of magnitude when it comes to comparing the airline industry pushing tons of metal fast and hard into and through the sky with AI pushing a bunch of electrons through a bunch of transistors. Seriously, way off.
I checked. The IEA says airlines generate about a gigaton of CO2, and it’s still growing since the dip of covid, which is perhaps where your infographic authors got their screwy figures, which are, like I suggested, the wrong order of magnitude.
Cite your source and compare also using your source?
Barely ever used it just for that reason and the fact that the algorithms are getting worse by the day. But now my work is forcing us to use it. To increase productivity you see…
I wonder how one gets banned from using these tools without just spraying non stop paste’s of expletives in to the chat box
OP, this statement is bullshit. you can do about 5 million requests for ONE flight.
i’m gonna quote my old post:
I had the discussion regarding generated CO2 a while ago here, and with the numbers my discussion partner gave me, the calculation said that the yearly usage of ChatGPT is appr. 0.0017% of our CO2 reduction during the covid lockdowns - chatbots are not what is kiling the climate. What IS killing the climate has not changed since the green movement started: cars, planes, construction (mainly concrete production) and meat.
The exact energy costs are not published, but 3Wh / request for ChatGPT-4 is the upper limit from what we know (and thats in line with the appr. power consumption on my graphics card when running an LLM). Since Google uses it for every search, they will probably have optimized for their use case, and some sources cite 0.3Wh/request for chatbots - it depends on what model you use. The training is a one-time cost, and for ChatGPT-4 it raises the maximum cost/request to 4Wh. That’s nothing. The combined worldwide energy usage of ChatGPT is equivalent to about 20k American households. This is for one of the most downloaded apps on iPhone and Android - setting this in comparison with the massive usage makes clear that saving here is not effective for anyone interested in reducing climate impact, or you have to start scolding everyone who runs their microwave 10 seconds too long.
Even compared to other online activities that use data centers ChatGPT’s power usage is small change. If you use ChatGPT instead of watching Netflix you actually safe energy!
Water is about the same, although the positioning of data centers in the US sucks. The used water doesn’t disappear tho - it’s mostly returned to the rivers or is evaporated. The water usage in the US is 58,000,000,000,000 gallons (220 Trillion Liters) of water per year. A ChatGPT request uses between 10-25ml of water for cooling. A Hamburger uses about 600 galleons of water. 2 Trillion Liters are lost due to aging infrastructure . If you want to reduce water usage, go vegan or fix water pipes.
Read up here !
If you want to look at it another way, if you assume every single square inch of silicon from TSMC is Nvidia server accelerators/AMD EPYCs, every single one running AI at full tilt 24/7/365…
Added up, it’s not that much power, or water.
That’s unrealistic, of course, but that’s literally the physical cap of what humanity can produce at the moment.
If you only include chat bots, your numbers look good. Sadly reality isn’t in “chat bots”.
Could you explain further?
Image/Video generation, analysis (them scrubbing the entire public internet) consumes far, far more than someone asking an AT “grok is this true”
Do you have a source for this claim? I see this report by Google and MIT Tech Review that says image/video generation does use a lot of energy compared to text generation.
Taking the data from those articles, we get this table:
AI Activity Source Energy Use (per prompt) Everyday Comparison Median Gemini Text Prompt Google Report 0.24 Wh Less energy than watching a 100W TV for 9 seconds. High-Quality AI Image MIT Article ~1.22 Wh Running a standard microwave for about 4 seconds. Complex AI Text Query MIT Article ~1.86 Wh Roughly equivalent to charging a pair of wireless earbuds for 2-3 minutes. Single AI Video (5-sec) MIT Article ~944 Wh (0.94 kWh) Nearly the same energy as running a full, energy-efficient dishwasher cycle. “Daily AI Habit” MIT Article ~2,900 Wh (2.9 kWh) A bit more than an average US refrigerator consumes in a full 24-hour period.
I’m not sure what you’re referencing. Imagegen models are not much different, especially now that they’re going transformers/MoE. Video gen models are chunky indeed, but more rarely used, and they’re usually much smaller parameter counts.
Basically anything else machine learning is an order of magnitude less energy, at least.
please elaborate?
I did some research and according to some AI’s this is true. According to some other AI’s this is false.
The statement strikes me as overblown extreme position staking.
I use AI in my work, not every day, not even every week, but once in a while I’ll run 20-30 queries in a multi-hour session. At the estimated 2Wh per query, that puts my long day of AI code work at 60Wh.
By comparison, driving an electric car consumes approximately 250Wh per mile. So… my evil day spent coding with AI has burned as much energy as a 1/4 mile of driving a relatively efficient car, something that happens every 15 seconds while cruising down the highway…
In other words, my conscience is clear about my personal AI energy usage, and my $20/month subscription fee would seem to amply pay for all the power consumed and then some.
Now, if you want to talk about the massive data mining operations taking place at global-multinational corporations, especially those trolling the internet to build population profiles for their own advantages and profit… that’s a very different scale than one person tapping away at a keyboard. Do they scale up to the same energy usage as the 12 million gallons of jet fuel burned hourly by the air travel (and cargo) industries? Probably not yet.
9.6kWh of energy in a gallon of jet fuel, so just jet fuel consumption is burning over 115 Gigawatts on average, 24-7-365.
“Dear expensive thing: Are you wasteful?”
Well what you said is not true, but since you are so interested in this, why limit it to AI? Just quit using computers all together.
What is not true?
They said that AI is polluting worse than global air travel. They are mixing up pollution vs energy used. If it was pollution global air travel creates 80 Million Tons of CO a month. All AI in use is 15 million tons a month. Global air travel is far more polluting.
As an aside, and this is crazy: there is a reference, in the article OP posted to a paper, that suggests that humans, are far worse than AI for CO creation depending on the task. Which I found surprising.
So I read the published paper in the journal Nature and:
Our findings reveal that AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO2e per page of text generated compared to human writer, while AI illustration systems emit between 310 and 2900 times less CO2e per image than their human counterparts. Emissions analyses do not account for social impacts such as professional displacement, legality, and rebound effects. In addition, AI is not a substitute for all human tasks. Nevertheless, at present, the use of AI holds the potential to carry out several major activities at much lower emission levels than can humans.
Ok I honestly did not see that coming.
Very well thought out response. Will respond in kind.
HurrDeeeDurrr K
Thanks for clarifying. You made up statistics, your post is nonsense.
And you responded without any consideration that the consistent reliance on computers, in general, is using a HUGE amount of energy, AI or not, indicate that you simply want to chase windmills and not have a conversation. Well played.
HurrDeeeDurrrr indeed. Next time let the grown ups talk.
Gaslighting schmuck. I “made up” nothing. Good day.
Edit: Arrrggg! I didnt mean to delete my comment I meant to add to it!
The point I was trying to make was that we are not going to quit using computers, AI or not. Data centers will continue to grow, AI will continue to be used because they are not going to quit either.
I said that before.
What I wanted to add: this is in agreement with several of the links in the article OP posted: more efficient algorithms, better hardware, regenerative water cooling instead of lossy evaporation.
The article suggests training on better models, heat recovery and re-use, even using AI to research better methods for processing and planning energy consumption for AI.
I was serious: we are unlikely to just throw out computers.
I stopped l, not that I used it that much, about 5 months ago.
Your article doesn’t even claim that. Do you have any idea just how carbon intensive a flight is?
300,000 liters of jet fuel to send one 747 across the Atlantic Ocean - one time.
I imagine people making that claim accept air travel as useful and “AI”, really, all datacenters as not useful. I’ve had people tell me oh, air travel is more efficient per mile that road travel. But this ignores that people wouldn’t drive thousands of miles if it was not as easy as booking a flight.
Or a LLM query?
A lot of these studies they list are already years outdated and irrelevant. The models are much more efficient now, and it’s mainly the Musk owned AI data centers that are high pollution. Most of the pollution from the majority of data centers is not from AI, but other use.
The old room-sized ENIAC computers used 150-200 kW of power, and couldn’t do even a fraction of what your smart phone can do. The anti-AI people are taking advantage of most people’s ignorance, intentionally using outdated studies, and implying that the power usage will continue to grow- when in fact it has already shrunk dramatically.
A Phone can’t do anything. It can send/receive and the datacenter does the work. Surely everyone understands this.
A modern AI data center have already shot right past 200 Terrawatt hours and are on track to double again in the next two years.
People can’t be this blind.
A phone can do a lot. Much much more than ENIAC era supercomputer (I think you’ll have to get pretty close to the end of the previous century to find a supercomputer more powerful than a modern smartphone)
What a phone can’t do is run an LLM. Even powerful gaming PCs are struggling with that - they can only run the less powerful models and queries that’d feel instant on service-based LLMs would take minutes - or at least tens of seconds - on a single consumer GPU. Phones certainly can’t handle that, but that doesn’t mean that “cant’ do anything”.
I’ve run small models (a few Gb in size) on my steam deck. It gives reasonably fast responses (faster than a person would type).
I know that they’re far from state-of-the art, but they do work and I know that the Steam Deck is not going to be using much power.
LoL. Guess I can just get rid of phone’s processor then, huh?
And again, you link an image from an outdated study. Because the new data shows the use declining, so it wouldn’t help your fear mongering.
Reality is “fear mongering” is it? I agree.
If it were reality, you’d have some recent data. Might as well make projections on computer power use by starting with the ENIAC, and then you can claim computers are consuming more than our current energy output.
I have started using Copilot more lately, but I’ve also switched from plastic straws to paper, so I’m good, right?
I’ve also switched from plastic straws to paper,
The baby turtles thank you.
You can drink one less coffee per week and so save more carbon emission and water usage than not using LLMs.
Sauce?
Would love to have a read on that :)
Why did you start using straws at all?
idk if that’s the intended takeaway from those numbers.
According to AllAboutAI analysis, global AI processing generates over 260,930 kilograms of CO₂ monthly from ChatGPT alone, equivalent to 260 transatlantic flights, with 1 billion daily queries consuming 300 MWh of electricity.
according to the faa there are on average 5500 planes in the air every day, and while i couldn’t find an exact number there seem to be between 350 and 1 200 transatlantic flights every day, depending on season.
260 tons is still massive, but let’s not kid ourselves. it’s about equivalent to producing 12 new american-size cars.
Just goes to show that you don’t even need AI to spread misinformation! Haha
Thank you.
Idk if LLMs can tell which number is bigger. But we already knew humans can’t.
260,930 kilograms of CO₂ monthly from ChatGPT alone
ChatGPT has the most marketing, but it’s only part of the AI ecosystem… and honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if other AI products are bigger now. Practically every time someone does a Google search, Gemini AI spits out a summary whether you wanted it or not — and Google processes more than 8 billion search queries per day. That’s a lot of slop.
There are also more bespoke tools that are being pushed aggressively in enterprise. Microsoft’s Copilot is used extensively in tech for code generation and code reviews. Ditto for Claude Code. And believe me, tech companies are pushing this shit hard. I write code for a living, and the company I work for is so bullish on AI that they’ve mandated that us devs have to use it every day if we want to stay employed. They’re even tracking our usage to make sure we comply… and I know I’m not alone in my experience.
All of that combined probably still doesn’t reach the same level of CO² emissions as global air travel, but there are a lot more fish in this proverbial pond than just OpenAI, and when you add them all up, the numbers get big. AI usage is also rising much, much faster than air travel, so it’s really only a matter of time before it does cross that threshold.
they list the others in the article.
Yes, but there’s zero fucking actual benefit.
Seeing memes posted here that use AI while sitting on it is the most confusing thing to me.
Just… don’t use it, people. The hole burning in AI bros’ pockets will close up if you just stop making it profitable. Even the free ones are making money with ads. Don’t use it, even for a joke.
“AI” and related tech does a lot of useful translation work. It translates speech to text, one language to another, maybe skilled people can do these jobs more elegantly and correctly, but certainly not more cheaply.
Frankly focusing on the carbon output of AI models is a red herring. It’s not a significant part of the problem and just makes people complacent in the form of feeling like we’ve achieved something if it succeeds. It’s not worse than stuff like video games
Focus on the actual negative effects of AI, but carbon intensity isn’t a major one
I’m much more concerned about AI datacenters’ use of evaporative cooling draining freshwater reserves than the carbon footprint atm
we do a lot of things for no benefit. video games, golf, horse racing, grilling… all those have far larger carbon footprints. as someone else said, focus on the actual negatives of generative ai, like the proven cognitive decline and loneliness.
deleted by creator
in the comment i replied to you only mention that there’s no benefit, and you replied to me talking about carbon footprint.
People like you wouldn’t have seen the benefit in cars vs horse and carriages, computers vs typewriters and books, or watches vs sundials.
I bet you think that the only thing AI is used for is ChatGPT style conversations too.
Theoretically, sure there’s potential. But it shouldn’t be getting used as a commercial product in the meantime.
Especially generative. Letting it write, compose, create… All of that is 1,000% a mistake. The kind accessible to the public can’t currently create at scale without unethical access to source material.
It shouldn’t be getting shoehorned into every job possible while it’s still in this pre-alpha kind of state.
Although I don’t actually know the ratio of research use vs casual use, tbf. But this shit gotta be litigated and used properly with proper guidelines, not just thrown out like this.
It’s still way too early for this shit. Our willingness as a species to just jump into new tech should have been tempered to be smarter by now.
Maybe I would’ve been reluctant about those technologies. But I am convinced with data. And so far I’ve only seen problems with it, no actual benefits.
wouldn’t have seen the benefit in cars
Yeah, because the widespread adoption of cars turned out to be such a great idea with no negative consequences… But even if you ignore the glaringly obvious negatives, AI still doesn’t come anywhere close to having the practical utility as the modern car. At least a car can carry out its advertised function without issues.
I’ve been using AI almost daily for several years now, as a function of my job. It’s garbage tech. Most of the things it’s supposed to be good for it downright sucks at, and the stuff it is good at has already been possible using simpler, more reliable systems for years — sometimes even decades. The situation isn’t really improving, either. Models are using more energy, consuming more data, and doing more computation than ever before… but the results are still embarrassingly underwhelming. Anyone who’s bothered to educate themselves on the math and method behind the models knows by now that the current generation of AI is dead-end technology, and anyone who claims otherwise is either ignorant of the technical details, has a vested financial interest in AI, or both.
It also really fucking irritates me to be constantly called a Luddite by people who don’t even know how this technology fucking works… No, I don’t hate AI because I’m scared of technology, or “progress” or whatever the fuck. I’ve made a career working in technology. I love tech… or I used to, before everyone lost their god damn minds praying to Sam Altman and his horrifyingly expensive golden idol. No, I hate AI because it’s demonstrably bad technology.
Sounds like a PICNIC issue to me.
I personally enjoy using it to the point I’m ready to pay for it. It helps me figuring out rather complex things where I wouldn’t even know what to type into a normal search engine to start tackling the problem. Imo, both forcing people to use it and forbidding people to use it, is making people unhappy. Just let people work the way they want to.
Yesterday I got just a regular ChatGPT explaining me how to convert some geometry into screen space using inverted transform matrix of the camera and dividing x,y by z in camera space to get the projection and then normalizing using min/max x,y, then after I got some bad results trying to get those numbers into the place where I need them, writing me a script that transforms my node-based Blender geonodes setup into JSON (just for the sake of giving this JSON to ChatGPT for analysis), then after reading this JSON explained to me some advanced control and data flow intricacies of geonodes and recommended a setup I could use to reshape control and data flow the way I need. This is all rather useful and would take more time and effort to gather all this information by myself. And it’s not like I’m not learning anything, it just makes learning faster.
spoiler
Which is why I threw up in my mouth a little when my boss said we all need to be more bullish on AI this morning.
Replace your boss with it.
Same. And they basically jizz their pants when they see a practical use for AI, but 9 out of 10 times there’s already a cheaper and more reliable solution they won’t even entertain.
There’s practical use for AI?
My boss is also a fuckwit
I’ve mentioned it before but my boss’s boss said only 86% of employees in his department use AI daily and it’s one of his annual goals to get that to 100%. He is obsessed.
They’re salivating at the chance to reduce head count and still make money. Employees are by far the largest cost for any company. They hate paying it out when it could be for them.
You should correct their spelling of “bullshit”
Bitcoin or crypto?
It also pollutes the mind of ignorant people with misinformation. Not that that is anything new. But I do think objective truth is very important in a democratic society. It reminds me of that video that used to go around that showed Sinclair Broadcasting in like 20 some different ‘local’ broadcast news all repeating the same words verbatim. It ended with ‘This is extremely dangerous to our democracy’. With AI being added to all the search engines, it is really easy to look something and unknowingly get bombarded with false info pulled out of the dregs of internet. 90% of people don’t verify the answer to see if it is based in reality.
What is this masterpiece ? Pro-pornography subliminal propaganda ?
The emoji usage, heading & bold text pattern makes me certain the article was written using AI.
