AI Art Seething General

[AnOminous]

How is that a good example? Is it any better if a human was intruding on my privacy compared to an unthinking unfeeling cold machine? If anything I rather not want a Reddit moderator or a Karen looking through my activities just as much as I don't want it being done with an AI system. The mechanism of the surveillance is irrelevant, accuracy or efficiency be damned, I rather there be limited or no surveillance, period.

What if the AI was really hot, though?

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

Capitalism allows people to compete with each other as long as the way they compete is within the bounds of law.

We're so far removed from traditional capitalism that it's really not even funny. All of these businesses in the copyright cartel are enabled by government monopoly only. They make data, which is infinitely reproducible, and the FBI hunts down teenagers who fuck with them.

What are you blathering about? AI lawsuits are about what rights people have.

Oh, I thought we were talking about the rights of machines, since people insist on treating a machine as equivalent to the human brain because of marketing.

AI isn't a perfect recording device. It's not even a lossy recording device.

It's most certainly a derived work, and there are laws about those.

When you train on many works, a model can become more than the sum of its parts

It can appear to be more than the sum of its parts.

What about a factory, creating products millions of times faster than a human can?

A factory, buying raw materials and turning them into something useful, seems downright romantic compared to this shit. There are special regulations about factories because of how many people they can kill, be they employee or customer.

 

[The Ultimate Ramotith]

Part 1 - Where they stress the need for regulation regarding unauthorized replicas and deepfakes, but acknowledge that style cannot be copyrighted: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyri...telligence-Part-1-Digital-Replicas-Report.pdf (archive)

This would be interestin, given that 'art style theft' is an inflammatory topic in art circles.

By the by, there is Matt Walsh talking about some terrifying use of AI:

 

[Runch]

Oh, I thought we were talking about the rights of machines, since people insist on treating a machine as equivalent to the human brain because of marketing.

So you're just generally sperging about every argument you think anyone has ever made on the subject of AI, so you don't have to actually stop and think about the argument in front of you, and realize there's not really anything you can do to dismantle it?

It's most certainly a derived work, and there are laws about those.

Yes, and the law says that you're allowed to derive a short summary from your viewing of the Minecraft trailer, because your written analysis doesn't actually contain any part of the trailer, and is transformative. Likewise, AI models don't actually contain any imagery and the training process is transformative.

It can appear to be more than the sum of its parts.

What are you even arguing here? If AI is more than the sum of its parts, that supports your view more than mine. If it's no more than exactly what it is, and none of what it is contains images, doesn't that spell the end of any claims that the data infringes? You're so eager to denigrate AI that you end up arguing against yourself.

A factory, buying raw materials and turning them into something useful, seems downright romantic compared to this shit. There are special regulations about factories because of how many people they can kill, be they employee or customer.

Yes, and likewise there are regulations about taking someone's artwork for yourself because of the way it could affect the creator who owns it, which is why it's good that AI obeys those regulations by not copying others' artwork.

 

[UERISIMILITUDO]

So you're just generally sperging about every argument you think anyone has ever made on the subject of AI, so you don't have to actually stop and think about the argument in front of you, and realize there's not really anything you can do to dismantle it?

I'm not trying to dismantle anything. I'm just arguing against the post that was linked in the community happenings thread. It's fascinating to see so many of you carrying water for corporations just because it pisses other people off.

Likewise, AI models don't actually contain any imagery and the training process is transformative.

They clearly do, or they wouldn't be able to make exact copies of some of their inputs.

What are you even arguing here?

These things likely don't extrapolate at all from their inputs, and it is merely the very large amount of data that gives the appearance of doing this.

Yes, and likewise there are regulations about taking someone's artwork for yourself because of the way it could affect the creator who owns it, which is why it's good that AI obeys those regulations by not copying others' artwork.

Whatever, I guess we're done here.

 

[linchan]

They clearly do, or they wouldn't be able to make exact copies of some of their inputs.

This virtually never happens, unless you are talking about Image 2 image, in which case it doesn't even do it exactly either. It's a statistical impossibility that it can generate the same exact image. Not to mention if someone wanted to make an exact copy of something, all they have to do is copy the original file without the use of AI.

 

[Book Thief]

So the Touhou community has been on fire the past week because ZUN apparently decided to use AI for some of the spell backgrounds, even though ZUN has previously said that he views AI generative tools fairly negatively and that he's "bored" with them. From what I can tell, it has something to do with the Photoshop editing software and the stock images they used, some of which may have involved the use of AI. A more extensive overview can be viewed from this post.

When the news of this broke to the Anti-AI zealots online, they declared that ZUN using AI in his own games means that he's committed some kind of sin against the Church of Artists, even though he's already his own artist, and the majority of his games are one-man affairs, so the whole argument of "they're taking jobs away from artists" doesn't apply here.

Spoiler: A few snapshots from Steam threads

Spoiler: A couple Reddit posts

This guy pretty much sums up my feelings on the whole ordeal:

 

[femboy fart huffer]

carrying water for corporations

Saying that copyright is fucking retarded is simping for corpos? It wasn't the little old artist sat in his attic with a paintbrush that lobbied for the past 70 years to continually extend copyright protections. You know especially considering that most of the twitter artists that sperg out in the threads here make money from drawing copywritten characters and benefit from lax copyright laws.

They clearly do, or they wouldn't be able to make exact copies of some of their inputs.

You know the research paper that this myth came from is complete bullshit right? Even the researchers intentionally trying to get ai to reproduce training images couldn't get it to actually reproduce them. The paper typed in 'bloodborne poster' into an AI and then when it gave them something that vaguely looked like the official box art claimed that it was able to spit out perfect recreations of the training data.

Also no, no AI model contains training images. Models contain millions if not billions of images, the result is a model a few gb in size. If you can compress that much information to that small of a size you would not be making AI with it you would be doing shit a lot more impactful and practical.

It's most certainly a derived work, and there are laws about those.

And star wars copied dune; when are you filing a lawsuit against George Lucas? Everything is derivative that's how fucking art works. Everyone is inspired by something else and picks up techniques from someone else, people don't just blink and suddenly they make something, there's a process to it and that process involves other people. AI copied from twitter genshin artists, who copied from mihoyo, who copied from previous gacha games, who copied from the anime at the time, who copied from the original anime, who copied from the kanagawa wave guy's tentacle porn, who copied the salvator mundi, who copied from grug drawing deer sex on the cave wall. AI is dogshit at copying people anyway, you need a fucking purpose made lora to copy someone's style and even then they don't work very well.

It's just more of this misdirection bullshit. You want to bitch about AI then there's a shit load of problems with it. You're arguing that the poor little multibillion dollar pedowood corpos are upset when the technology very easily and probably will result in some sort of chinese greatfirewall/social credit big brother 1984 system.

Either way thanks for posting here, means I don't have to bother screenshotting shit and posting it here myself.

 

[Dawdler]

I am incredibly fucking stupid.
Does this mean people can't just AI scrape my family photos and use them to make fake people for profit?
Or can they do that now?

What do you think facebook is for ?

 

[linchan]

So the Touhou community has been on fire the past week because ZUN apparently decided to use AI for some of the spell backgrounds, even though ZUN has previously said that he views AI generative tools fairly negatively and that he's "bored" with them. From what I can tell, it has something to do with the Photoshop editing software and the stock images they used, some of which may have involved the use of AI. A more extensive overview can be viewed from this post.

When the news of this broke to the Anti-AI zealots online, they declared that ZUN using AI in his own games means that he's committed some kind of sin against the Church of Artists, even though he's already his own artist, and the majority of his games are one-man affairs, so the whole argument of "they're taking jobs away from artists" doesn't apply here.

Spoiler: A few snapshots from Steam threads

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Spoiler: A couple Reddit posts

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This guy pretty much sums up my feelings on the whole ordeal:
View attachment 7360512

This is the first time I discovered Touhou was a game and not a tag on Japanese porn.

 

[Runch]

I'm not trying to dismantle anything. I'm just arguing against the post that was linked in the community happenings thread.

Against a professor specialized in copyright law who notes that the USCO was suddenly acting oddly partisan and going far beyond their station in the kinds of declarations they made? You disagree with that, you think they should be able to unilaterally determine new laws?

It's fascinating to see so many of you carrying water for corporations just because it pisses other people off.

The law applies equally to everyone. If it's illegal for corporations to train AI, then it's equally illegal for individuals. I "carry water" for myself and my own ability to make finetunes if I desire. Because again, I'm not illegally copying anything.

Arguing that training isn't fair use is a massively pro-corpo position. Think for 5 seconds: who out there owns 100+ years worth of entertainment media? Who lays claim to be able to train on any data that passes through their servers, with millions of users agreeing to those terms? If AI training isn't fair use, I personally have no licenses to anything. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Disney and others already have licenses to tens of thousands of hours of video and millions of images to do whatever they like with.

If AI training isn't fair use, ONLY corporations get to have AI, and sell access to it to plebs for a premium.

If it is fair use, then anyone can keep working with this technology. The stuff that a few motivated individuals can do with AI are the only things in recent memory that actually allow us to escape the dominance of corporations.

 

[jray4559]

So the Touhou community has been on fire the past week because ZUN apparently decided to use AI-

Further supporting my own personal belief that ZUN should have declared the series finished after LoLK. Honestly if he actually did deliberately use AI that's based on his part, not one person would actually care about the spell card backgrounds (he surely could have just reused ones from previous games probably and nobody would bitch). Wonder how many that seethe will still end up playing the game and being part of the nightmare that is the modern community.

It's going to be funny the next couple of years, assuming AI gets a bit better and usage of it starts taking off, just how many of the faggy autismos' favorite quirky games are gonna end up with the dreaded label. A lot of them probably think that every game that has this label is gonna be subject to a super-massive boycott, when in reality instead it'll end up being like the California cancer warning: almost everything has it, and no one cares. The salt will be well worth it...

 

[AmpleApricots]

On my quarter-yearly trawl on steam I've been seeing games here and there that disclose that they use AI generated art, mostly because they're one-man projects. I saw some games where the disclaimer wasn't necessary (as it was blaringly obvious), and some others where I probably wouldn't have noticed from the get go. Applying AI art to projects, as I predicted, is clearly also a skill you got to have. Definitively not a press button -> recieve art thing. If the dev has a "pre-AI" history, you can also often see the vast improvement in art quality in the newer, AI assisted titles. Programmer art always will be programmer art. I fail to see how this is a bad thing. People had no trouble creating soulless slop pre-AI, tbh.

Between 1998-2002 I was writing a game on the side (it never materialized, sorry) and one of the big demotivating factors (another one was that computers simply weren't powerful enough for what I wanted to make back then) for me was that I could've not made it look like I saw it in my head if my life depended on it, yet also did not have the resources to have an artist (this whole gig economy for art didn't really exist then either, the internet was barely a thing, after all). I feel if I had AI art then, the chance of that game existing would've been a lot bigger.

 

[Book Thief]

Further supporting my own personal belief that ZUN should have declared the series finished after LoLK. Honestly if he actually did deliberately use AI that's based on his part, not one person would actually care about the spell card backgrounds (he surely could have just reused ones from previous games probably and nobody would bitch). Wonder how many that seethe will still end up playing the game and being part of the nightmare that is the modern community.

As far as I or anyone can tell, the AI he used was trained on stock images, which means that, no, ZUN isn't stealing your precious doodles on deviantART. The guy's used tons of stock images in the past, so him using an AI based on them is just making it easier for him to create unique art assets faster.

As for anyone who thinks him using AI means he's getting "lazier," all I can say is, "Where the fuck have you been the past 20 years?" Because on one hand, his art style has gotten more refined over the years, but at the same time, he's taken a lot of shortcuts he didn't take in his earliest works, many of which I feel detracts from the overall quality. Between continuing to recycle sprites from PoFV, a game from 2005, while also cutting down on alternate poses for portraits, and most egregiously in my opinion, having the ending cards go from watercolor-esque artwork to simply just the linework, ZUN has gotten lazier as an artist as time has gone on.

I mean seriously, how do you go from this...

...to this, and not feel like you're skimping out on us?

So to anyone thinking that ZUN's getting "lazier" for using AI art, get in fucking line.

 

[femboy fart huffer]

I saw some games where the disclaimer wasn't necessary (as it was blaringly obvious)

The only game that I've seen use AI was like that. I thought I'd give it a go just to see. It was a pretty cool sounding idle game. And it just gave me this indescribable feeling. It felt like the mid point between a stroke and dyslexia, it kinda felt like how looking at some alien computer would, you can see things but your mind just doesn't want to comprehend them for some reason. It was possibly one of the most surreal gaming experiences and I highly doubt it was intentional. Also the game was shit.

 

[femboy fart huffer]

Possibly new most retarded AI shit. Someone posted this image, incredibly obviously not a mistake from ai and obviously intentionally drawn this way.

I then read the caption, must have been a fair few people accusing you of using AI to bother responding to it, maybe it was just one person that got a lot of attention? Surely you wouldn't make a response post to a single person that got 0 likes right? Surely not. Yea so anyway here is the only comment or quote tweet of the main post that mentions AI in any manner.

It's not even an accusation either. And honestly, unlike transvestigations, you can get almost perfect text with AI anyway. Even just generic anime models are decent at text now. And even if they aren't then I can just go in and manually write the text and let the denoiser help homogenise it with the rest of the image for me. I assume this person means the full on schizo tier transvestigations, which is kinda fitting. Obsessing over whether something is or isn't fake when in reality no one except a small cult of deranged people give a shit is a good comparison.

Anyway in response to this statement (not accusation) and mentioning transvestigations, someone commented this on the quote tweet.

A twitter user hallucinating an oppressive force for them to 'go to war' (tweet about for a couple hours at most) against? Who would have expected something like that from twitter dot com? Oh yea they're also a kpop stan. Not sure what you think saying 41 instead of AI will do? Do you think skynet is real and will hunt you down for daring to slander it? Or is it going to steal your nose or whatever the fuck happens if you say 'Voldemort'?

Also noticed a few people, or maybe one guy on a few alts, spamming popular art tweets with grok image requests like this.

I had a look at this guy's bio and it says he's Korean so this might just be a language barrier thing of him not understanding that this person is trying to fuck with them. Also this image looks nothing like the original post anyway.
Someone in the comments dropped this banger though.

I just want to point out, these are not the same account. bibisi_gobbler and enjoyerofboobz are obviously two different urls. I just think it's funny that this person believes it is an actual genuine Israel fan doing this. Like yea Israel is literally doing a heccin Geno Samuel slide or whatever the fuck but man the AI art is just inexcusable. Raping children, that's fine, but AI art? But it makes sense that the anti Israel person would be defending the tweet with the words 'need to explode some people' in it. This specific account has been suspended as of writing though.

There's a load of different versions. I first saw it from the guy that posted this screenshot.

Anyway of course the comments had very good takes on how to deal with poop nigga hitler 69, because you absolutely must do something about the online trolls you can't just ignore or block them you must stop them and make them die in real life and give them testicular torsion or whatever the fuck.

Spoiler: many screenshots

Here's some very high quality and good advice from the comments section. Use glaze, that thing that doesn't work. Or follow the advice of this 'gay black hispanic it/it's mlp and bluey fan'.

Here's another brilliant solution. Disable comments. No twitter artist would do this, they all want the praise and attention for their work, so they're never going to do this. Also once again, poop nigga hitler 69.

Here's how to spend your time wisely. Block people that did not interact with you, have any intention of interacting with you, and then publicly announce it where they can see and now have a reason to interact with you. This guy is not an artist, just some random guy on twitter. I am once again aware of the irony of saying this person had a good use of their time while being 10 paragraphs deep into this post.

Literally none of the images in any of the replies looked anything like the original post. It was also done with i2i so grok will not remember that specific image. Grok did not use this image as training data in any way.

Spoiler: comparison

You can really see how much of the original image grok stole, it comes through so obviously.

My guy went from monster hunter but mecha to a 40k rip off. Even if that looks nothing like a space marine and I only said that because I saw the colour blue. There's still a fucking annoying cunt in both images though, maybe that's what was stolen?

Genuine question; how is adding an Israel flag to something a sign of nazisim? I don't know about you but the nazi party made their thoughts on jewish people pretty fucking clear. Or are we talking about neonazis and fascists and you're just too much of a retard to realise that nazis can't exist anymore because the fucking nazi party got splattered on the walls and ceiling of a Berlin bunker?

Also the post has 50 comments, 5 of them are grok requests. If that's a raid then it's a fucking pathetic one. I could do better on my own. Literally three people and that's what we're calling a 'raid' nowadays?

I actually agree with this person. It is indeed fucking low effort shit. And yet it still works. There's this theory about the invention of agriculture. It goes something along the lines of: when humans first started experimenting with growing crops we had no understanding of selective breeding or anything like that. It was just throwing seeds in the ground and hoping. The groups that coincidentally managed to plant a large amount of 'good' crops would keep on with that lifestyle, but other groups that had lower quality crops either starved to death or more likely returned to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and abandoned the idea of farming. The people with the good seeds distribute them to others and the cycle repeats. Those people are also more likely to have seeds to plant the next year or to distribute compared to the people with lower quality crops that might not have had enough to last the whole winter and were forced to eat the last of their seeds. Over time that process kept happening until the only people remaining as farmers were people who had crop seeds viable enough to be a consistent food source and what we would consider domesticated. The idea is that instead of humans naturally selecting the crops it was more that we were the ones being naturally selected without really understanding it. I forgot where I was going honestly. But basically it's not the troll's fault for being basic bitches, it's the people giving them what they want's fault. Oh yea also the one comment is someone requesting grok lol.

Here's someone claiming that the group of people that are very clearly not bots, are infact bots for some strange reason. I mean yea you could make a bot to do this, but why would you?

Yea it's going to be tough. How will people ever deal with light trolling and bait accounts on the internet? Truly a new era of humanity is dawning.

There were a few of these, this one is the best.

Grok really doesn't like these sorts of inpainting type requests though, most of the ones like this had that strange shit on the image that looks like monitor burn or something.

More people blindly believing that this is the work of the Israelis for some strange fucking reason.

I heard that the mandatory IDF training involves a course on AI training nowadays. Also once again Israel is one of the most important countries in semiconductor manufacturing, the servers that twitter are ran from, the tablet you used to draw and the gpus used to run AI with would all not exist if Israel didn't, it's as much theirs as it is yours at that point. Why the fuck do you think America is so steadfast on defending Israel and Taiwan you retards?

Just more strange bot accusations. This one's extra retarded.

The bots are trained on buzzwords? They're trained .... on buzzwords? On buzzwords? How do I train a bot on buzzwords? I would assume I get a bot to scrape twitter look for any posts mentioning palestine and spam the grok add israel flag, right? But this post is a fucking mecha version of a video game dragon. The caption is 'B-52 Bazelgeuse'. Where's the buzzwords? How do I get a bot to find that? I do not understand what the fuck this person is thinking honestly. The best part is that the original post the top comment is one of the add israel flag posts, the next is actually a dead internet theory chatgpt tier engagement bot. No sorry, take that back. Not a bot. He's just Brazilian.

Here's the real gem.

This person replied to the original post with generic shit calling these people bots or teenagers, yawn. Before I say anything, I would like to mention that I scrolled through a bit of this person's profile to find this post. I would genuinely invite you to guess what they post.

Spoiler: its popular with autists

Spoiler: the first entry in the series was in 2009

Spoiler: theres only on human in the series

Spoiler: currently 5 main games in the series

Spoiler: the vast majority of characters are not even remotely human

Spoiler: has one song that if you played the game you know off by heart

It's fucking plants vs zombies. PvZ porn. No. I am not joking.

Spoiler: Grok, how do I remove cactus spikes from my prostate?

Anyway. I just found that fucking baffling. Like none of it is really that bad, it's not like it's scat porn or anything like that. It's not disgusting, it's just fucking confusing. Back on topic though. I'd like to say first of all, the troll account doesn't care if you like him or not, the idea is to annoy you, you are encouraging him. Second of all, his name is poop niggA hitler 69, it's a soft a so it's not racist, even if he was then it's a fucking bait account why would he give a shit if you think that poop nigga hitler is a racist or not? Third of all, because it makes speds like you annoyed. Fourth of all, why would you seek out someone's account to tell them not to interact with you, this comment was left on a post that hitler made, not a comment, he went to hitler's account to find this post and interact with it, now you're telling him not to interact. This is what we call making yourself a target and encouraged him to interact with you. And fifth of all why the fuck are you enumerating a twitter comment? It makes you look low functionally autistic compared to the high functioning autistic the rest of your profile portrays you as.

That's not it for our sunflower fetishist though. He went and posted this as a reply to a completely random post. The comment has a screenshot of hitler's account. I just don't understand what the fucking logic here is? Some guy gets banned for a joke, someone calls him retarded and should have known what would happen, then you come in to say that a completely fucking random unrelated person is being racist to another fucking completely random unrelated person that have interacted with neither of you? What the fuck is going on inside your brain why the fuck did you feel the need to post this what are you doing this is just fucking baffling? And how the fuck is the guy a predator? You haven't interacted with him and even if you had he is obviously just doing shit to get a rise out of people which yea might include making edgy jokes about children that you're too autistic to realise is him taking the piss out of you but that doesn't fucking matter because he hasn't interacted with you anyway and it still wouldn't fucking make it relevant to this tweet. I am just fucking confused please dear god help me I do not understand this logic outside of just 'let me spam my issues on this popular tweet' and if that's the logic why didn't he do this on more than one tweet?

I will move swiftly on from whatever the fuck that was.
Here's some people giving genuine advice.
Here's someone saying it's just bait, less likes than people randomly assuming that the people who are obviously humans are bots. Because it's twitter, why would actually useful things get attention?

This one's kinda funny to me, I just expect the average anti AI retard would be more offended at the ableist language or whatever than the AI itself.

Twitter likes are retarded and meaningless, but I will just assume that the 29 likes on this post and the 72 on the one suggesting glaze means that 3x more people believe that glaze will fix all the problems better than just blocking and ignoring them will.

Though maybe glaze would work here? With i2i stuff at least does it work? It's been ages and I honestly can't remember much other than it fucking sucks.

 

[The Ultimate Ramotith]

Genuine question; how is adding an Israel flag to something a sign of nazisim? I don't know about you but the nazi party made their thoughts on jewish people pretty fucking clear. Or are we talking about neonazis and fascists and you're just too much of a retard to realise that nazis can't exist anymore because the fucking nazi party got splattered on the walls and ceiling of a Berlin bunker?

Those are mental gymnastics. In their 'anti-fascist' heads, anyone who commits genocide is automatically a Nazi, even more so, since 'Palestinians' and Moslems are 'people of colour' who have been 'persecuted' in loads of other places, notably after September 11. There is also how their mental image of Jews is white. (All of this ignores how spending 5 minutes in Islamic media shows a non-stop hatred towards Jews... or tha the 'Palestinian' population actually increased after October 7... or the many self-documented rapes, murders, and tortures Hamas did to Jews.)

Pulling this post back on topic, here is a usual fretter abou th environmental impact of AI:

https://jackels-in-space.tumblr.com/post/772869687673536512/california-wildfires-raise-alarm-on-water-guzzling

https://archive.ph/Rgouo

I’m sorry but please stop using AI.

Not only does it use other people’s work as base training (let’s not forget about the fact that C.AI creators have been taking fics to build up chat bots) it also like…destroys the environment.

They need computers capable of giving you quick responses and that generates heat and what cools things down? AC and water.

Genuinely go search it up it’s insane.

Stop using AI.

If you feel like you want to post and you’re like “oh but I don’t think I’m good enough” I sympathise I really do every writer friend I know has had that exact same experience but you’re never gonna get better if you don’t try.

You’re never gonna learn anything if you use AI so stop assisting big corporations in destroying the world and actually try.

If you feel scared about your actual writing if it’s any good or not I am so happy to beta it for you but please just try that’s all I’m asking.

I’ve supplied a couple of links so you know I’m talking nonsense but please do your own investigation <3

The above post hen shows the following links, mainly focusing on the use of water AI uses:

https://fortune.com/article/how-much-water-does-ai-use/

https://archive.ph/cdGbq

California wildfires raise alarm on water-guzzling AI like ChatGPT​

In order to shoot off one email per week for a year, ChatGPT would use up 27 liters of water, or about one-and-a-half jugs.

If there weren’t enough of an argument against AI from an environmental standpoint, a new waterfall of data might push even the most ambivalent consumer over the edge.

Per the International Energy Agency, energy consumption by global data centers could more than double by 2026, “reaching levels that exceed large nations.” Ironically, “while we’re using AI to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges—from climate modeling to health-care breakthroughs—we’re also contributing to an environmental crisis of a different kind,” Chris Gladwin, a tech founder and CEO, wrote for Fortune recently.

How much water does AI use?​

Now, reporting finds that OpenAI’s ChatGPT—which uses the GPT-4 language model—consumes 519 milliliters or just over one bottle of water, to write a 100-word email. That’s according to the Washington Post in a research collaboration with the University of California, Riverside.

In order to shoot off one email per week for a year, ChatGPT would use up 27 liters of water, or about one-and-a-half jugs. Zooming out, WaPo wrote, that means if one in 10 U.S. residents—16 million people—asked ChatGPT to write an email a week, it’d cost more than 435 million liters of water.

While much has been made about the power usage each ChatGPT prompt immediately necessitates, the water conversation has gained additional steam in recent months.

As WaPo explained, every prompt a user enters into ChatGPT is quickly turned into code, and “flows through a server that runs thousands of calculations to determine the best words to use in a response.” All those calculations go through real, physical servers which are housed in enormous data centers around the world. Spitting out an answer—or answering a command—makes the servers heat up, like an under-duress old laptop.

Why does AI use water?​

This is where water comes in; to keep those ever-important servers from overheating and breaking down, the data centers rely on cooling mechanisms, often via “cooling towers” that themselves require water. Each facility, depending on the climate where it’s based, uses a different amount of water and electricity. West Des Moines, Iowa, is quickly becoming a popular destination, owing to a temperate climate that calls for fewer cooling interventions.

“We haven’t come to the point yet where AI has tangibly taken away our most essential natural water resources,” wrote Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of engineering at UC Riverside who has been trying for years to quantify AI’s climate impact. Nonetheless, Ren called AI’s increasing water usage “definitely concerning.”

Amid rapid population growth and a changing climate, “depleting water resources and aging water infrastructures” are some of the most preeminent challenges, he wrote in November. “The concern is not only about the absolute amount of AI models’ water usage, but also about how AI model developers respond to the shared global challenge of water shortage.”

How are AI companies addressing water and energy use?​

Droughts, he noted, are among the most immediate consequences of climate change, and it’s incumbent upon businesses to address water usage in their operations—and tech firms using generative AI top that list. “We already see heated tensions over water usage between AI data centers and local communities,” Ren wrote. “If AI models keep on guzzling water, these tensions will become more frequent and could lead to social turbulence.”

Google and Microsoft report rising water consumption​

In Microsoft’s sustainability report last year, the company said its global water consumption had spiked 34% between 2021 and 2022. Over the same period, Google’s water usage rose 20%, it wrote in its own report. “It’s fair to say” that the majority of that growth at both companies “is due to AI,” Ren told the AP at the time. (Microsoft’s data center used up 700,000 liters of water in training GPT-3, WaPo reported.)

Holly Alpine, who was once Microsoft’s senior program manager of Datacenter Community Environmental Sustainability, resigned from the company earlier this year on principle, she wrote for Fortune, due to the company’s ecologically irresponsible AI development.

“Analyst reports suggest that advanced technologies—such as AI or machine learning—have the potential to increase fossil fuel yield by 15%, contributing to a resurgence of oil and potentially delaying the global transition to renewable energy,” Alpine wrote. “The real-world impacts are staggering: A single such deal between Microsoft and ExxonMobil could generate emissions that exceed Microsoft’s 2020 annual carbon removal commitments by over 600%.”

When she was a Microsoft employee, she wrote, she witnessed “dozens” of such deals.

https://theconversation.com/ais-excessive-water-consumption-threatens-to-drown-out-its-environmental-contributions-225854

https://archive.ph/LwKHd

AI’s excessive water consumption threatens to drown out its environmental contributions​

The promise of AI comes at the expense of water availability and quality.
Water is needed for development, production and consumption, yet we are overusing and polluting an unsubstitutable resource and system.

Eight safe and just boundaries for five domains (climate, biosphere, water, nutrients and aerosols) have been identified beyond which there is significant harm to humans and nature and the risk of crossing tipping points increases. Humans have already crossed the safe and just Earth System Boundaries for water.

To date, seven of the eight boundaries have been crossed, and although the aerosol boundary has not been crossed at the global level, it has been crossed at city level in many parts of the world.

For water, the safe and just boundaries specify that surface water flows should not fluctuate more than 20 per cent relative to the natural flow on a monthly basis; while groundwater withdrawal should not be more than the recharge rate. Both of these boundaries have been crossed.

These thresholds have been crossed even though the minimum needs of the world’s poorest to access water and sanitation services have not been met. Addressing these needs will put an even greater pressure on already-strained water systems.

AI’s potential​

Technological optimists argue that artificial intelligence (AI) holds the potential to solve the world’s water problems. Supporters of AI argue that it can help achieve both the environmental and social Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), for example by designing systems to address shortages of teachers and doctors, increase crop yields and manage our energy needs.

Understand how AI is changing society​

In the past decade, research into this area has grown exponentially, with potential applications including increasing water efficiency and monitoring in agriculture, water security and enhancing wastewater treatment.

AI-powered biosensors can more accurately detect toxic chemicals in drinking water than current quality monitoring practices.

The potential for AI to change the water used in agriculture is evident through the building of smart machines, robots and sensors that optimize farming systems.

For example, smart irrigation automates irrigation through the collection and analysis of data to optimize water usage by improving efficiency and detecting leakage.
As international development scholars who study the relationship between water, the environment and global inequality, we are curious about whether AI can actually make a difference or whether it exacerbates existing challenges. Although there is peer-reviewed literature on the use of AI for managing water and the SDGs, there are no peer-reviewed papers on the direct and indirect implications of AI on water use.

AI and water use​

Initial research shows that AI has a significant water footprint. It uses water both for cooling the servers that power its computations and for producing the energy it consumes. As AI becomes more integrated into our societies, its water footprint will inevitably grow.

The growth of ChatGPT and similar AI models has been hailed as “the new Google.” But while a single Google search requires half a millilitre of water in energy, ChatGPT consumes 500 millilitres of water for every five to 50 prompts.

AI uses and pollutes water through related hardware production. Producing the AI hardware involves resource-intensive mining for rare materials such as silicon, germanium, gallium, boron and phosphorous. Extracting these minerals has a significant impact on the environment and contributes to water pollution.

Semiconductors and microchips require large volumes of water in the manufacturing stage. Other hardware, such as for various sensors, also have an associated water footprint.

Data centres provide the physical infrastructure for training and running AI, and their energy consumption could double by 2026. Technology firms using water to run and cool these data centres potentially require water withdrawals of 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic metres by 2027.
By comparison, Google’s data centres used over 21 billion litres of potable water in 2022, an increase of 20 per cent on its 2021 usage.

Training an AI at the computing level of a human brain for one year can cost 126,000 litres of water. Each year the computing power needed to train AI increases tenfold, requiring more resources.

Water use of big tech companies’ data centres is grossly underestimated — for example, the water consumption at Microsoft’s Dutch data centre was four times their initial plans. Demand for water for cooling will only increase because of rising average temperatures due to climate change.

Conflicting needs​

The technology sector’s water demand is so high that communities are protesting against it as it threatens their livelihoods. Google’s data centre in drought-prone The Dalles, Ore. is sparking concern as it uses a quarter of the city’s water.
Taiwan, responsible for 90 per cent of the world’s advanced semiconductor chip production, has resorted to cloud seeding, water desalination, interbasin water transfers and halting irrigation for 180,000 hectares to address its water needs.

Locating data centres​

As water becomes increasingly expensive and scarce in relation to demand, companies are now strategically placing their data centres in the developing world — even in dry sub-Saharan Africa, data centre investments are increasing.

Google’s planned data centre in Uruguay, which recently suffered its worst drought in 74 years, would require 7.6 million litres per day, sparking widespread protest.

What emerges is a familiar picture of geographic inequality, as developing countries find themselves caught in a dilemma between the economic benefits offered by international investment and the strain this places on local water resources availability.

We believe there is sufficient evidence for concern that the rapid uptake of AI risks exacerbating the water crises rather than help addressing them. As yet, there are no systematic studies on the AI industry and its water consumption. Technology companies have been tightlipped about the water footprint of their new products.

The broader question is: Will the social and environmental contributions of AI be overshadowed by its huge water footprint?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/13/labour-ai-datacentre-growth-zone-water-shortages-abingdon-reservoir

https://archive.ph/sF1mk

Water shortage fears as Labour’s first AI growth zone sited close to new reservoir​

First datacentre site proposed seven miles from Abingdon reservoir planned for water-stressed south-east England

Datacentres use cooling towers and outside air systems, both of which need clean, fresh water.

Labour’s first artificial intelligence growth zone will be sited close to the UK’s first new reservoir in 30 years, sparking fears that the AI push will add to the “severe pressure” on water supplies in the area.

Keir Starmer announced on Monday that he would hugely increase artificial intelligence capacity and reduce planning restrictions on companies that wanted to build datacentres by setting up “growth zones” with fewer constraints.

The first of these will be in Culham, Oxfordshire, only seven miles from a reservoir planned by Thames Water in Abingdon, which was supposed to provide water to people in the severely water-stressed south-east of England. This is the area of the country most at risk of running out of water, according to the Environment Agency. Oxfordshire has faced particular issues, with areas reliant on bottled water during heatwaves.

AI datacentres use a large amount of water, as their servers generate heat. To prevent computer systems overheating and shutting down, the centres use cooling towers and outside air systems, both of which need clean, fresh water. AI consumes between 1.8 and 12 litres of water for each kilowatt hour of energy usage across Microsoft’s global datacentres. One study estimates that global AI could account for up to 6.6bn cubic metres of water use by 2027 – the equivalent of nearly two-thirds of England’s annual consumption.

Even without a big increase in AI datacentres, by 2050, England faces a shortfall of nearly 5bn litres of water a day between the sustainable supplies available and the expected demand. This is more than a third of the 14bn litres of water currently put into public supply. The south-east faces a potential deficit of more than 2.5bn litres a day in the same period.

AI could wipe out gains made by businesses in reducing their water consumption; the government is seeking a 9% reduction in non-household (business) consumption by 2037-38 from 2019-20 levels, and currently businesses are on course to achieve a reduction of 6.1%.

Adrian Ramsay MP, Green Party co-leader, said: “While communities will face heatwaves, droughts and water shortages over the coming decades, this strategy locks us into pumping huge amounts of water into AI datacentres. One estimate said AI-related infrastructure may soon consume six times more water than Denmark, a country of 6 million people. What will this mean for residents in water-stressed communities like Culham in Oxfordshire?”

Prof Hannah Cloke from the University of Reading added: “The south of England already has severe pressure on water resources, which is getting more acute as we build more homes and look to grow hi-tech industries, all of which need more power and water. We know that as the climate changes in the UK there will be a more variable supply of water from the sky with hotter drier summers which will exacerbate the demands on cooling systems that datacentres need.”

AI datacentres also use a lot of energy. The International Energy Agency estimates that datacentres’ total electricity consumption could double from 2022 levels to 1,000 terawatt hours in 2026, approximately Japan’s level of electricity demand. AI will result in datacentres using 4.5% of global energy generation by 2030, according to calculations by the research firm SemiAnalysis. In January, Amazon, the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, announced it had bought more than half the output of an offshore windfarm in Scotland.

A Thames Water spokesperson said it was not a statutory consultee for datacentres, meaning the company did not need to be asked about the availability of water. Thames intends to ask the government whether sustainable sources, such as surface water, can be used to cool the datacentres, rather than water directly from the reservoir.

The government is setting up a dedicated AI Energy Council chaired by the science and energy secretaries. The government said it intended to work with “energy companies to understand the energy demands and challenges” that would fuel AI’s development. It hopes small modular nuclear reactors could power datacentres.

Prof Gopal Ramchurn, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton, said: “AI expansion has been a concern for the National Grid but the speed at which AI compute demand is growing has taken everyone by surprise and, unless we balance the above tradeoffs right, with appropriate policies, all the cheap and green energy we have will be used by big tech companies, pricing out families suffering energy poverty already.”

Some scientists have said there are environmental opportunities from AI. Dr Shaun Fitzgerald, teaching fellow at the University of Cambridge, said: “The increased energy use of AI should not be considered in isolation, but rather coupled with the potential energy reduction that intelligent control of our energy systems could enable. There are incredible opportunities to make more of what we already have in our energy system, and integrated AI control has the potential to unlock them.”

A government spokesperson said: “We recognise that datacentres face sustainability challenges such as energy demands and water use. Many newer datacentres are already addressing these issues, using advanced cooling systems that significantly reduce water consumption.

“Through the AI Energy Council, we’ll also build on this progress by exploring bold, clean energy solutions – from next-generation renewables to small modular reactors – to ensure our AI ambitions align with the UK’s net zero goals. We’re also unlocking £104bn in water infrastructure over the next five years, which includes supporting water supply resilience in and around datacentres.”

 

[Soggy Floppa]

Are they aware that water cooling doesn't erase the water from existence? All it does is make it warm.

 

[femboy fart huffer]

Are they aware that water cooling doesn't erase the water from existence? All it does is make it warm.

Have you ever gooned so hard you broke the laws of thermodynamics? Apparently these people have.

 

[The Ultimate Ramotith]

Are they aware that water cooling doesn't erase the water from existence? All it does is make it warm.

The straightforward answer is tha they believe that evaporation erases the water from existence, even when in reality water vapour i still water.
They are also worried about how this reduces the amount of available fresh water that living beings need; there would not be that big a ruckus if AI was cooled with regular seawater.