“But surviving uses more resources than generating value for the shareholders. Why are you so selfish?”
"Farms use more water than Al data centers" OK, I'll go without Al and you can go without food and we'll see who lasts longer
Submitted 5 hours ago by beep@piefed.world to [deleted]
Comments
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Many farms are owned by corporations not families. Shit, which one is more profitable?
nerv@fedinsfw.app 4 hours ago
We can shut down 90% of datacenters today, suffer a slight inconvinience to our lives and keep living.
We have a farm failure…
crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 hours ago
I keep seeing this argument and it stinks of astroturfing. Probably to portray data centers the same as farms: a resource-intensive but necessary infrastructure. If they wanted to make a good faith argument, it would be good courses, not farms. And I could also go without golf.
Focusing solely on water consumption with these arguments is another red flag. Its easy to find false equivalencies with water, but no other project demands double the power output of the entire state it’s in, and not many other projects have as bad a ratio of taxpayer dollars spent to revenue generated.
tempest@lemmy.ca 21 minutes ago
Not all farms are required.
Farmers like to claim they are ‘growing your food’ while exporting grain and selling corn for ethanol or shipping alfalfa to Saudi Arabia for cattle feed.
They are incredibly unsympathetic.
ReCursing@feddit.uk 4 hours ago
The point you are DELIBERATELY missing is that farms use so much water than AI data centres that the amount data centres use is irrelevant. The water usage claims are so ridiculously overblown and so obviously stupid that it’s appalling that people believe them! I have seen people genuinely claim that water used in data centres is destroyed and can never be recovered, or that it’s polluted so badly it can never be cleaned. Farms not only use multiple orders of magnitude more water, they also pollute it a hell of a lot more so it’s far more difficult to clean and more damaging to the environment. A lot of the claimed numbers come from one person who got gallons and megalitres confused! Just stop spreading this utter nonsense! <haters will not respond with downvotes for calling them out, and more repeatedly debunked nonsense, because they always do, they’re really dull as well as annoying!>
roux2scour@jlai.lu 5 hours ago
Meat is worse than AI for the environnement, and you can go without meat (except some health condition)
I work daily with my company’s hosted LLM, and the last 6 months of use had the same environnemental impact as eating 10g of beef
Also i use an old model, in a country with mostly decarbonate electricity, and not with agentic mode, so it may have worse impact elsewhere
This is not an argument for ai though, pushing for ai use where it shouldn’t be used is dumb, wasteful and armful for society, just saying that if you are a dev using llm for occasional help and prototyping, eating less meat will be far more helpful for the environnement
HikingVet@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
Meat is worse than AI for the environnement, and you can go without meat (except some health condition)
We can also go without AI. Meat can give nutritional value.
All I’ve seen AI do is reconcentrate wealth to the top 1% of tech bros. LLMs are chat bots that give out information that have to be independently verified.
roux2scour@jlai.lu 2 hours ago
We can also go without ai Yes Meat can give nutritional value Palm oil gives nutrients, yet its cultivation pollute. Meat production pollute, and it’s consumption can be reduced or replaced.
All I’ve seen AI do is concentrate wealth to the top 1%tech bros. I agree. Also consider that meat industry has it’s own big evil shareholder that exploit farmers to produce shit for consumers
My whole point is not ai good meat bad.
Its : if your argument against ai is water, energy and pollution (which i agree with, all this datacenter, hardware and energy consumption is nonsense compared to the little scope of where ai is useful), don’t oppose it to farming industry, or also fight against intensive meat production, which also involves a john shareholder that destroys the planet
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Counter point, meat is fucking delicious and AI is just a shell game of stock manipulation that’s going to crash and throw the world into another Great Depression
roux2scour@jlai.lu 1 hour ago
As if meat industry where not also driven by stock manipulation, exploitation, destruction of natural habitat, to grow food for developped country consumers, when a lot people still don’t have safe access for food.
Meat delicious is based on personal taste. This argument is as valid as “using ai is so fun”, so argument rejected
kevin2107@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
pick a different reason to hate AI sheeple. water isn’t it
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Pick a better reason to want AI. water is a significant issue, especially when it’s commercialized and not everyone has access to clean water.
You can go fuck yourself for defending AI.
The blasting for building these places is literally shaking people’s homes apart. The noise pollution after construction is vibrating people to death. Go setup camp next to a data center and come see us in 100 days.
kevin2107@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
There ya go!!! those are great reasons. I’m not defending it just the water issue doesn’t add up when cattle takes up way more and we have alternstive meat options in 2026.
nroth@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Some datacenters are still built with cooling towers instead of chillers. I know for a fact Amazon does this. They are slightly cheaper, but massively wasteful. I think we need better laws for the irresponsible companies, but this is not most datacenter companies. If I heard a Google datacenter was going up near me, I would not care. If I heard an Amazon one was, I would be organizing against it as hard as possible.
blarghly@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I mean, assuming we are discussing the US where almost all datacenters are being built -
the real thing to realize is not that datacenters are bad (I’m kinda ambivalent), nor that meat is bad, but that poorly written water rights laws are bad. Which is why we grow some of our most water-intensive crops in some of our driest areas and some farmers end up just flooding the desert with water for no reason each year. Restructuring water rights would massively reduce water usage while maintaining food production for the simple reason that then we would stop growing alfalfa in Pheonix