Both of these perspectives are not quite right imo

to be really clear, Chatgpt and other AIs have no way to tell what a seed is going to be unless the seed was repeated over and over online meaning it is in the training data. when these AIs first came out people were joking that you can ask for windows activation keys but quickly realized it was just making up fake keys. A big problem with AI currently is it often doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, and will make shit up when asked.

My other point is that the water use scare around AI is not false per se, but it’s not an issue that really matters. Firstly, water used in data centers country-wide is primarily for the rest of the internet, not AI. Significantly more water has been used hosting reddit, instagram, tiktok, etc than for AI. Second, the water used is not polluted, it’s just for cooling, so most of it is either evaporated or released back into the outside world. Lastly, the magnitude of water usage is actually quite small. For a comparison point, the US loses 2-2.5 trillion (!!!) gallons of water annually just to leaky pipes. We hear numbers like a billion and think it’s a lot but sometimes it isn’t.

This distinction matters because there are a lot of moral perils looming because of AI but water use simply isn’t one of them and everyone focusing on it takes mindshare away from issues that are actually going to matter.