Andy Masley

Happy to provide. I will say that literally all these sources are already available in this HN thread, but its hard to find and many of the comments are down voted. So here you go:

This link has a great overview of why generative AI is not really a big deal in environmental terms:
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true

GenAI is dramatically lower impact on the environment than, say, streaming video is. But you don't see anywhere near the level of environmental vitriol for streaming video as for AI, which is much less costly.

The European average is 56 grams of CO2 emissions per hour of video streaming. For comparison: 100 meters to drive causes 22 grams of CO2.

https://www.ndc-garbe.com/data-center-how-much-energy-does-a...

80 percent of the electricity consumption on the Internet is caused by streaming services

Telekom needs the equivalent of 91 watts for a gigabyte of data transmission.

An hour of video streaming needs more than three times more energy than a HD stream in 4K quality, according to the Borderstep Institute. On a 65-inch TV, it causes 610 grams of CO2 per hour.

https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/it-medien/netflix-disney-und-co-klimakiller-streaming-so-koennen-sie-energie-beim-filmeschauen-einsparen/29410674.html

Here is another helpful link with calculations going over similar things:…

We've previously had e.g. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/individual-ai-use-is-not-bad-for?open=false#%C2%A7how-many-people-are-actually-using-llms

TFA is light on statistics and can only describe the water usage in terms like:

> AI data centers require vast amounts of water for cooling, with a recent study finding that the technology used as much water annually as people drink from water bottles worldwide.

But that is a pretty small fraction of total water use. Even if you drink as much water as health experts recommend and get all of it from one-use plastic bottles (which the health experts probably don't recommend and environmental experts definitely don't) that would be far less water than you use to run the dishwasher (which to my understanding is more water-efficient than doing dishes by hand) or to take a bath or shower. To say nothing of agricultural use.

> ... emitting a NYC worth of CO2 in a year is dizzying

Simplified comparisons like these rarely show the full picture [0]. They focus on electricity use only, not on heating, transport, or meat production, and certainly not on the CO2 emissions associated with New York’s airports. As a rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate, a flight from Los Angeles to New York with one seat is on the order of 1,000,000 small chat queries CO2e.

Of course we should care about AI’s electricity consumption, especially when we run 100 agents in parallel simply because we can. But it’s important to keep it in perspective.

[0] https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about

What are you talking about? He goes into plenty of data, domain relevant definitions, specific cases, etc? Links to reliable sources for every numbers claim, of which there's several per paragraph, shows graphs, pictures, and does a lot of math (all of which I manually checked myself on paper as I went through). Also, the writing style is very much not ChatGPT-like, especially with all of the very honest corrections and edits he's added over time, which an AI slop purveyor wouldn't do.

The deep analysis starts at this section:
https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake?open=false#%C2%A7national

You can't just dismiss anything you don't like as AI.

The reported case about water wells running dry had to do with issues in construction rather than anything about the data center's regular operation:

> But the reason their taps ran dry (which the article itself says) was entirely because of sediment buildup in groundwater from construction. It had nothing to do with the data center’s normal operations (it hadn’t begun operating yet, and doesn’t even draw from local groundwater). The residents were wronged by Meta here and deserve compensation, but this is not an example of a data center’s water demand harming a local population.

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake#%C2%A7local

>The people having glass literally break from the vibrations would probably disagree with your opinion

Can you cite a source for this? It's not in the video, as far as I can tell.

I would be wary of Benn Jordan's videos. They are full of mistakes and misrepresentations, as Andy Masley has convincingly demonstrated: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center-and

I recall seeing Benn Jordan's responses on Bluesky and thinking they were quite poor. He was unwilling to admit to mistakes, and kept trying to grasp at newly searched papers that didn't actually support his arguments.