Andrew on Nostr: I saw this quote on BlueSky and it's rapidly gaining squatter's rights to the inside ...
I saw this quote on BlueSky and it's rapidly gaining squatter's rights to the inside of my head:
> “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. … 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.”
— https://fortune.com/article/how-much-water-does-ai-use/
I get it. The average reader has no idea if 519ml is a lot in terms of water usage. Even if you know metric, it's lacking context. But the article does less than nothing to provide any.
It makes sense to try to turn it into an annual figure, but without telling us what an adult's average water usage is, all it's doing is converting ml/email to jug-years per email-week.
And it's not even doing that right! In what world is 27L "about one and a half jugs"? 10L water containers exist, but I don't think they're what anyone pictures when you say "jugs". (There is no need to tell me what *you* are picturing. Grow up.)
Then the whole-population stat suffers from the same issue — they don't tell us what the USA's total water usage is, so I've no idea if 435m litres is a lot. And again, the conversion is wrong anyway. 10% of the US population isn't 16 million, it's 34 million.
But mostly, if I wanted to communicate "519ml" to an American, I'd say "about a pint". The article calls it "just over one bottle". Why is America like this? They won't use metric, they use imperial, except they don't because they've made up their own version, and they don't even use that, they measure everything in "cups" and "bottles" and "jugs" and apparently they've all just agreed that a jug is 20 bottles and a bottle is 2.11338 cups.
> “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. … 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.”
— https://fortune.com/article/how-much-water-does-ai-use/
I get it. The average reader has no idea if 519ml is a lot in terms of water usage. Even if you know metric, it's lacking context. But the article does less than nothing to provide any.
It makes sense to try to turn it into an annual figure, but without telling us what an adult's average water usage is, all it's doing is converting ml/email to jug-years per email-week.
And it's not even doing that right! In what world is 27L "about one and a half jugs"? 10L water containers exist, but I don't think they're what anyone pictures when you say "jugs". (There is no need to tell me what *you* are picturing. Grow up.)
Then the whole-population stat suffers from the same issue — they don't tell us what the USA's total water usage is, so I've no idea if 435m litres is a lot. And again, the conversion is wrong anyway. 10% of the US population isn't 16 million, it's 34 million.
But mostly, if I wanted to communicate "519ml" to an American, I'd say "about a pint". The article calls it "just over one bottle". Why is America like this? They won't use metric, they use imperial, except they don't because they've made up their own version, and they don't even use that, they measure everything in "cups" and "bottles" and "jugs" and apparently they've all just agreed that a jug is 20 bottles and a bottle is 2.11338 cups.