Study author says tech companies are reaping benefits of artificial intelligence age but society is left to pay cost

Study author says tech companies are reaping benefits of artificial intelligence age but society is left to pay cost

The AI boom has caused as much carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere in 2025 as emitted by the whole of New York City, it has been claimed.

The global environmental impact of the rapidly spreading technology has been estimated in research published on Wednesday, which also found that AI-related water use now exceeds the entirety of global bottled-water demand.

The figures have been compiled by the Dutch academic Alex de Vries-Gao, the founder of Digiconomist, a company that researches the unintended consequences of digital trends. He claimed they were the first attempt to measure the specific effect of artificial intelligence rather than datacentres in general as the use of chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini soared in 2025.

  • plantfanatic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    21·
    20 days ago

    I mean this just makes it sound like New York City needs to lower their emissions.

    All the AI is as bad as ONE city, that really doesn’t sound that bad in that case, but when you start realizing, coal country, reliant on cars. Where does New York fit in? Middle? Top of the list of most pollutant cities?

    Without context it doesn’t mean much. If it’s the lowest emitting city, well then This is good isn’t it?

      • village604@adultswim.fanEnglish
        7·
        20 days ago

        When you start getting into numbers as high as CO2 emissions, they start becoming meaningless without something to relate to.

      • plantfanatic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        20 days ago

        What?

        The figures have been compiled by the Dutch academic

        Where does Americans come into this other than being referenced by another country?

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      10·
      20 days ago

      What a terrible take. NYC houses like 9 million people, with even more coming from all over the world for work. What does AI do for that same footprint?

      • plantfanatic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        20 days ago

        Tokyo has more population in a smaller footprint. What’s your point? Is Tokyo above or below New York? Makes an important reference point.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          6·
          20 days ago

          It’s a different discussion, because you’re comparing a city to a city. The original comparison shows just how insanely inefficient and dirty these data centers are. Any city with millions of residents should have orders of magnitude higher rates of pollution than any data center.