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The Cost of Imitative AI or Environmental Cope [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-05-15

Imitative AI has a boat load of externalities, and the shaky financial foundations of these companies demand that they ignore those externalities. Aside from the questions of theft of people’s work for training data, the largest issue is the environmental cost. Some corners of the AI and AI adjacent world sometimes argue that imitative AI isn’t really all the environmentally unsound. After all, everything we do uses electricity and if it wasn’t imitative AI, it would be something else. What is happening in Memphis puts lie to that argument.

Musk, in his attempt to create the most racist and sexist imitative AI possible (and called Grok because that little Nazi cosplayer is apparently physically incapable of understanding any science fiction he reads — and I say that as someone who hates Stranger in a Strange Land), has built a massive new data center in one of the poorer parts of Memphis. They did so, of course, without proper permitting and the gas generators that power the facility have none of the air pollution filters and countermeasures required by federal law. The facility is in a part of Memphis that already leads the state in asthma attacks and is, unsurprisingly, making the people in the area sicker than they already are.

It is important to understand that the data center exists only to fuel Grok, Musk’s imitative AI product. They chew up enough power to fuel 280,000 homes and they do so using fossil fuels, further worsening the environmental crisis. And, of course, they are likely shortening the lives of people who live in the immediate area with their pollution. They had to have the “temporary” generators because the data center uses so much power that the local utility could not source it. This is not a matter of repurposing power from other tasks — these systems require significantly more power (and water for cooling) than other kinds of computing and industry. Real people are suffering, right now, so that Musk can have a chatbot that takes clothes of pictures of people without their permission. Oh, what a glorious new future we live in.

The idea that imitative AI systems are not environmentally problematic is nonsense. It is either cope or bullshit. It is a fact that imitative AI takes more energy and water to perform its tasks than other forms of comparable computing. Imitative AI firms power requirements are delaying the retirement of coal fired power plants. Companies like Microsoft have abandoned their environmental goals in the face of the power demands of imitative AI. Leaders in the industry have stated outright that we shouldn’t care about the environmental costs of imitative AI because of the supposed benefits. It is ridiculous to think that these impacts are minimal or even remotely worth the costs.

The benefits of imitative AI are significantly overstated. It is not going to solve climate change, for example. It literally cannot. Imitative AI is merely a regurgitation machine, spitting out what it thinks comes next based on its training data. it can produce nothing that it has not been trained upon, and it cannot produce anything really original. It merely copies and remixes. For some tasks, that is sufficient to get a useful result, though fewer than any people seem to realize. It is not sufficient to come up with original ideas or solutions — especially since its accuracy keeps getting worse with newer models and approaches. It learns what people have produced in the past and can only generate what people in the past would most likely have put next in the sentence or picture. It is not coming to save us for anything, unless we are looking for a way to survive a mustard gas attack in the trenches of WWI France. And even then, it will probably get about one third to two thirds of its users killed because it cannot tell truth from lies. (Grok, how do I survive a mustard gas attack without a gas mask? Grok: First, take a deep breathe of the gas …")

And in the meantime, it uses so much energy that careless fools like Musk throw massively polluting gas turbines into poor neighborhoods, destroying their quality of life and likely shortening the lives of its residents. I know that people like Altman and Musk are kept alive by the dream of never having to pay a person for thought or creative work again, but is creating an email you don’t need to send in the first place really worth a world where people are forced to ask “How come I can’t breathe at home and y’all get to breathe at home?”

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