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butterfly / cobra

The real story of AI's water footprint, the animal-agriculture comparison no one makes, and how one bad stat went viral.

The viral “one email, one bottle of water” claim started with a genuine 2023 preprint: half a liter for a whole conversation of 10–50 prompts on GPT-3. Then, in September 2024, the Washington Post wrote up that data into a fancy infographic, where the idea started to make a splash. Funnily enough, that original post argued that training GPT3 used the same amount of water as the amount of beef two US Americans eat in a year. But this caveat only appeared at the very end of the piece, and readers didn’t seem to put the water usage of AI into that perspective — only the “one bottle of water” claim stuck. From there, it spread like wildfire (you know wildfire, the stuff that animal agriculture is fueling). Tom’s Hardware put the worst case in the headline (three bottles!), a news TikTok with over a million likes carried it further, and Snopes, an actual fact-checking site, repeated it without much scrutiny. By 2026, Claude’s water use had clawed its way into becoming folk belief, beyond any attempt at numeracy. Some say that writing "please" and "thank you" to a chatbot is an act of environmental vandalism. TikTok is full of vague water-use claims. Brands are slapping it on billboards. Politicians are capitalizing on it. Millions of people now feel a small pang of ecological guilt over an amount of liquid that couldn’t even water a houseplant. The punchline is that the researcher who produced the original figure has since walked it back to roughly 15 mL for GPT-4. This correction, needless to say, has not gone viral.

Waiting patiently for all the people expressing outrage over other people's ai use due to environmental concerns/water use to seriously reduce their consumption of animal products for the same reason. ⏳

#vegan #if you hate ai you have to stop eating meat

loumandliker

armand, amadeo, arun

#iwtv #holy shhhhh #he hurts my heart

bianxiee-arts

tashinoru yagi or smthin h

#bnha #my man unfortunately #i will die on the all might hill #we interrupt patho posting only for toshinori yagi

hypnosees

mermay on the gorkhon!

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AU where mermaid clara washes up on shore the same day the gorkhon gets poisoned and all the fish start dying. artemy and daniil are a fisherman and marine biologist who want to help.

#pathologic #OP your mind #i read your tags and need more #this is soooo beautiful

isleypig

Actually I think forcing an animal to be pregnant every year of their life and subsequently slaughtered just to get their milk is cruelty and not good for them. I actually think that sounds like torture.

#veganism

ultra-baklan-the-ovosh

#pathologic #nods politely when dankovsky shatters #nods politely when burakh is bloody #nods politely when clara plays the flute #RAUCOUS APPLAUSE WHEN RAT LOOKS AT ME #OP i love this #i especially love rats tho

niedosyt555

heated rivalry this. heated rivalry that. what about friendly rivalry ? huh ? do you not want to watch rich korean lesbian drug addicted students get involved in murder mysteries ? because I do.

#its good btw im clawing at the walls

rollercoasterwords

you will hear zero complaints from me about increasingly explicit gay pornography being incorporated into “mainstream” tv shows but what i will call for is a corresponding increase in explicit lesbian sex. i want dykes crawling around on their hands and knees begging to eat pussy on every tv screen in america. worldwide, even

#send tweet