This is a really excellent deep dive into AI water use and how a lot of discourse around it is at best inaccurate and at worst deliberately misleading.
A great example of how it's misleading is the NYT story about an AI datacenter causing local wells to dry up for residents, but the story is actually about the construction causing water issues - the datacenter wasn't active, hadn't been finished, and the construction could easily have been for a shipping hub or housing development. Framing "construction company did not do appropriate groundwater surveys and fucked up the water table" as "data centers guzzling up water" is extremely disingenuous.
The substack article I linked is quite long and quite technical, and if you're not interested in reading it Hank Green has made a video discussing the fact that there is a lot more nuance in the discourse around AI water use than the most vocal Pro-AI or Anti-AI people are interested in examining.
There are a lot of people who say that all AI use is theft. I think that's uncomplicatedly wrong, that if you're using "theft" the way that the DMCA uses "theft" you're wrong. For more on that, I'd recommend reading the "Expanding Copyright is not the Answer" section of @mostlysignssomeportents's adapted speech on AI criticism or the EFF's comments to the copyright office RE generative AI. (You should actually read both, and you should read Doctorow's article in full because it is a criticism of AI that moves beyond thought terminating cliches to really explore why the AI industry as it stands is bullshit).
I do not, generally speaking, like AI. I think that most AI products create shit results. I think most AI art looks like shit and most AI writing is awful bordering on unreadable. I think that there's a massive bubble built up around AI and I think AI is absolutely fucking the personal computing market.
And, all that said, it is deeply annoying to dislike AI as much as I do and still feel the need to point out that the way that a lot of people criticize AI is shortsighted, reactionary, and just flat-out incorrect. There are real things wrong with how we are approaching AI as a society and how AI is being sold to users and forced into our environments, and "art theft" is not one of those things.
(And this is everyone's reminder that fair use is the best, I love it, and you are allowed to copy, distribute, remix, sell, and do whatever you want with my art and writing whenever you want to. Every time I write something like this people come into my inbox to say "I hope your art gets stolen" and I'm like "Bitch, me too, the fuck?")
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