Why do people fight so hard to be fencesitters? The video is about criticising H Green’s actions and teaching people to identify AI writing, but it seems like he just made the video to cash in on a trending topic. He therefore had to feign an opposition to AI, but couldn’t even do that.
Here’s a TL;DR if you don’t want to waste 3 minutes watching the intro of this:
- 1 He says there is “moral panic” about LLM usage
- 2 He says that being concerned about the water usage is hypocritical if you use any electronic device at all (citing in particular iPhone chargers, for some reason)
My responses to that would be
- 1
This is no moral panic - we are concerned with over-usage of this tool, because, like drugs, spending too much time doing it seems to drive people insane and reduce their critical thinking skills.
We can look at car, trains and planes as an “essential” technology - for travel - which we similarly wouldn’t want someone to over-use in any way, for pollution, congestion, and brain chemistry reasons. As well as wasting their time and not living the most authentic human experience they could do.
- 2
LLM datacenters are of a ridiculous scale. They can be as big as nuclear power plants
It is also less about “is it doing something bad to our water that other things are also doing,” its a response to a visible, active, existential threat to communities (e.g rural communities or poorer neighbourhoods where these data centers are placed)
Obviously we can criticise the new problem of Data centers without mentioning other technologies that might pollute water. I think Jones also misunderstands the criticism of LLMs regarding water, because he tried to relate it to “oh but every electronic device you use connects to the hydroelectric system.” - this doesn’t necessarily pollute the water, whereas something about datacenters pumping water in for cooling does
I subbed to him for language videos for a few months, but unsubbed when he started dropping Zionist talking points…
I started watching this guy a while back for solid language content, but he seemed to be drifting into gateway right-wing grievance bullshit so I dropped him like a hot potato.
It’s definitely a pattern: apolitical youtuber gains an audience and then slowly starts drifting further and further right, pulling along their audience with them. Almost makes one think it’s planned from the start, or maybe they just get an offer from Fascist Corp when they get to a certain level.
If only they were better at being subtle about it!
I think they’re pretty good at it, actually. Politically naive folks, especially kids, don’t pick up on it.
I commented on that video the day it came out and I’m still having arguments with people on it.
There seems to be two common threads:
- claiming that data centers use as much water as a golf course and no more energy than any other big building “because they use new more efficient designs”
- comparing it to things that humans use to survive, like agriculture, refrigeration, heating and cooling
Both of these seem to be some right wing influencer or news casters talking points and they’re both insane.
The actual facts:
- Retail data centers use about 6 million gallons of water a year. Yes that is almost the exact same as a golf course.
- Hyperscale data centers (the data centers that AWS, GCP, Azure, etc run on — the ones built, owned and operated by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — use 200+ million gallons a year. This is a fucking order of magnitude larger than a retail data center and IT’S STILL NOT HOW MUCH AI DATA CENTERS USE.
We don’t have numbers for AI data centers because they’re hiding them, but just from energy usage alone the water usage will be more, because that’s what the water is used for.
- Yes, new designs exist…but they don’t solve anything. Those new designs trade off water for electricity. Either they use more electricity or more water. Unless the design is completely renewable energy they are using just as much water (guess what power plants use to cool their systems?!?!?)
- The majority of new AI data centers are not using these new systems, so it’s literally just a red herring to stop your argument about water usage.
- Agriculture is used to keep people alive. If you deleted LLMs from the planet right now, nothing would happen. People would go back to their daily lives. You can’t delete food from the planet.
- I had a sixth but I can’t remember it. If I remember it I’ll put it here.
If y’all want my sources I can post them, just wanted to jot all this down quickly between meetings.
Lol, when I watched the video the first thing I did was check the comments to see if anyone had pointed out how stupid his point was about having a phone and disliking AI, and yes a few people were riffing on him for it
Dislike ratio is almost 8:1 now, which i think is unusually high (especially in the era of unmodded YT having the dislike button invisible)
I just don’t know what was going through his head.
- One of YouTube’s most beloved creators takes a break after being exposed for using AI heavily. He’s clearly functionally dependent on it.
- Hop on the trend of discussing this topic even though it’s slightly off topic for your own channel
- Know that everyone hates LLM
- Spend the beginning of the video calling out as idiots the people who most strongly hate AI - the kind of people who will have come to watch the video in the first place - and dismissing their arguments.
Maybe he was looking to fight that day
LLM datacenters are of a ridiculous scale. They can be as big as nuclear power plants
I need to correct this.
LLM datacenters are of a ridiculous scale. They can be as big as a town and require the entire electrical output of a nuclear power plant.
Indeed! I wasn’t confident enough but i had a feeling it was more like that
