Yeah, AI is shit and a massive waste of energy, but it's NOTHING compared to the energy usage of the airline industry.
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
411 points (87.4% liked)
Technology
75169 readers
2703 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
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?
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.
You said polluting worse than global air travel. Source?
Edit: to be clear, the comparison is data centers to air travel. Currently ai is rough 10 as much a search term and both use storage. So all tech center data use goes up and that seems to be what everyone compares it to. Ok quit using a computer that is how it stops. That's why I said it, but you won't, I won't, so the problem is we need to have better energy sources better processing with less energy and stop reliance on evaporative non reclaimed cooling.
Ai or not, data centers are going to grow, computer use is going to require more processing and better algorithms are required for better search, all of which causes engery consumption.
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?"
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(5 replies)
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?
view more: next ›