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mythicalredfox.bsky.social
Mythic 🦊
@mythicalredfox.bsky.social
810 followers 840 following 860 posts
Twitch Streamer | Urbanist | Retro Tech Nerd | He/They | 26 | BLM | 🆓 🇵🇸 | 🌹 | 🏳️‍🌈 | 💍/open | From MD🇺🇸, in ON 🇨🇦 | 🔞 | https://msha.ke/mythicalredfox
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mythicalredfox.bsky.social
Trump said something callous about a school shooting. Bushart posted a meme showing that, with the sentiment of "seems relevant today..." because he was highlighting the hypocrisy of Trump saying we need to "get over" a school shooting, but then hosting a ridiculous ceremony over Kirk's shooting.
Meme posted by Larry Bushart. Meme shows Donald Trump quoted as saying "We have to get over it." Quote: "Donald Trump, on the Perry High School mass shooting one day after." Bushart's caption upon the meme is "This seems relevant today..." It was posted on Facebook in a group discussing the Charlie Kirk shooting.
October 30, 2025 at 3:05 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
Tomorrow at 10AM EST, I'll be streaming live for my birthday! Will be hanging out and playing games with friends all day, so come say hi! ▶ www.twitch.tv/mythicalredf...
October 7, 2025 at 1:22 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
I cracked open Sartre's famous essay on anti-Semitism the other day, and the very opening pages discuss how clearly absurd it is to treat such things as merely discourse, as merely "opinions."

A 77 year old work, & yet Sartre's writing still meet the present moment better than most newspaper op-eds
If a man attributes all or part of his own misfortunes and those of his country to the presence of Jewish elements in the community, if he proposes to remedy this state of affairs by depriving the Jews of certain of their rights, by keeping them out of certain economic and social activities, by expelling them from the country, by exterminating all of them, we say that he has anti-Semitic opinions. This word opinion makes us stop and think. It is the word a hostess uses to bring to an end a discussion that threatens to become acrimonious. It suggests that all points of view are equal; it reassures us, for it gives an inoffensive appearance to ideas by reducing them to the level of tastes. All tastes are natural; all opinions are permitted. Tastes, colors, and opinions are not open to discussion. In the name of democratic institutions, in the name of freedom of opinion, the anti-Semite asserts the right to preach the anti-Jewish crusade everywhere. At the same time, we look upon persons and characters as mosaics in which each stone coexists with the others without that coexistence affecting the nature of the whole. Thus anti-Semitic opinion appears to us to be a molecule that can enter into combination with other molecules without undergoing alteration. A man may be a good father and a good husband, a conscientious citizen, highly cultivated, philanthropic, and in addition an anti-Semite. We say, it is because his experience has shown him that they are bad, because statistics have taught him that they are dangerous, because certain historical factors have influenced his judgment. Thus this opinion seems to be the result of external causes, and those who wish to study it are prone to neglect the personality of the anti-Semite in favor of a consideration of the percentage of Jews who were mobilized in 1914, the percentage of Jews who are bankers, industrialists, doctors, and lawyers, or an examination of the history of the Jews in France since early times. They succeed in revealing a strictly objective situation that determines an equally objective current of opinion, and this they call anti-Semitism, for which they can draw up charts and determine the variations from 1870 to 1944. Anti-Semitism appears at once a subjective taste that enters into combo with other tastes to form a personality, an impersonal and social phenomenon which can be expressed by figures and averages, one which is conditioned by economic, historical, and political constants. I do not say that these two conceptions are necessarily contradictory. I do say that they are dangerous and false. One may approve or condemn the import of wine from Algeria: here we have a case of an opinion on the admin of things. But I refuse to characterize as opinion a doctrine that is aimed directly at particular persons and that seeks to suppress their rights or to exterminate them. The Jew whom the anti-Semite wishes to lay hands upon is not a schematic being defined solely by his function, as under administrative law. He is a Jew, the son of Jews, recognizable by his physique, by the color of his hair, by his clothing perhaps, and, so they say, by his character. Anti-Semitism does not fall within the category of ideas protected by the right of free opinion. It is something quite other than an idea. It is first of all a passion. The "moderate" anti-Semite will tell you quietly "Personally, I do not detest the Jews. I simply find it preferable that they should play a lesser part in the activity of the nation." But a moment later if you have gained his confidence he will add "There must be something about the Jews; they upset me physically." This argument, which I have heard 100 times, is worth examining. First of all, it derives from the logic of passion. Can we imagine anyone's saying seriously "There must be something about tomatoes, for I have a horror of eating them"? It shows us that anti-Semitism in its most temperate form remains a syncretic whole which may be expressed by statements of reasonable tenor, but which can involve even bodily modifications. Some men are suddenly struck with impotence if they learn from the woman with whom they are making love is a Jew. There is a disgust for the Jew, just as there is a disgust for the Chinese or the Negro among certain people. Thus it is not from the body that the sense of repulsion arises, since one may love a Jew very well if one does not know what her race is; rather it is something that enters the body from the mind. It is an involvement of the mind, one so deep-seated and complete that it extends to the physiological realm. This involvement is not caused by experience. I have questioned a hundred people on the reasons for their anti-Semitism. A young actor without talent insisted that the Jews had kept him from a successful career in the theater by confining him to subordinate roles. A classmate of mine at the lycée told me that Jews "annoy" him because of the thousands of injustices that "Jew-ridden" social organizations commit in their favor. "A Jew passed his agrégation the year I was failed, and you can't make me believe that that fellow understood a poem by Ronsard or an eclogue by Virgil better than I." But he admitted that he disdained the agrégation as a mere academic exercise, and that he didn't study for it. Thus, to explain his failure, he made use of 2 systems of interpretation, like those madmen who, when they are far gone in their madness, pretend to be the King of Hungary but, if questioned sharply, admit to being shoemakers. His thoughts moved on two planes without his being in the least embarrassed by it. As a matter of fact, he will in time manage to justify his past laziness on the grounds that it really would be too stupid to prepare for an examination in which Jews are passed in preference to good Frenchmen. Actually he ranked 27th on the official list. There were 26 ahead of him, 12 who passed and 14 who failed. Suppose Jews had been excluded from the competition; would that have done him any good? Even if he had been at the top of the list of unsuccessful candidates, even if by eliminating one of the successful candidates he would have had a chance to pass, why should the Jew have been eliminated rather than the Norman or the Breton? To understand my classmate's indignation we must recognize that he had adopted in advance a certain idea of the Jew, of his nature and of his role in society. And to be able to decide that among 26 competitors who were more successful than himself, it was the Jew who robbed him of his place, he must a priori have given preference in the conduct of his life to reasoning based on passion. Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter which explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.
October 3, 2025 at 3:55 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
These creatures are such pure fucking evil, man. Smiling and laughing as they tear apart families and ruin lives.

www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/n...
Tucker May says that his wife, Barbara Gomes Marques, 38, was on her way to becoming a U.S. citizen when they headed to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building almost two weeks ago. He says that at the end of her meeting for her green card, someone asked his wife to accompany them down a hallway to make a copy of her passport, which they thought was the next step in her gaining citizenship after they were married last year. Now, he believes it was a trick to get the two separated before she was taken into custody by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. "Going home without her that night was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do," May said. "She put so much effort into looking nice, because she was excited to take a step toward becoming an American, and I had to go home, and I had to put away the shoes that they took off her feet and gave to me in a plastic bag." He says that Marques is a documentarian without a criminal record who came to the U.S. on a tourist visa seven years ago. Marcelo Gondim is an immigration attorney who is helping represent the couple. He says that Marques spent a week at the Adelanto ICE Facility in Adelanto, CA, before she was transported to a different detention center in Arizona. She is set for transport to Louisiana, which he believes is her last stop before deportation. He claims that this is a tactic now being used to convolute the process. "They're trying to remove her as far away as they can from her counsel, from her family, so that kind of cuts on her ability to defend herself," Gondim said. "Knowing that she's married to a U.S. citizen, she has a legal way to become a permanent resident in a matter of months. If they just gave her a chance to find her paperwork."
October 1, 2025 at 5:15 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
hello?
Me in VRChat, in my fox avatar, holding an old 1980's-style early cell phone.
September 29, 2025 at 9:52 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
Four-panel comic by Matt Lubchansky. In panel one, a man enters a room where a woman is crying while looking at her phone. He says "Hey, is everything okay?" She replies "It's just... The Bone Farmer... he died." In panel 2, the man, comforting her, says "He was that thing that would break into people's homes and steal their skeletons while they slept, right?" "So sad," she says. In the third panel, the two of them are fondly looking upon a framed photograph of a strange horrifying monster, in a suit and bow-tie. She says "I mean obviously: Ideologically I didn't agree with him, with regards to skeleton ownership. But his smart l'il bowtie!" The man says "You have to admire his tenacity for a cause he believed in!" In the final and fourth panel, a man with apparently no bones in his body, speaking from a cylindrical container his goopy body is kept in, says "Gonna have to disagree with you folks here." He is cut off by the first man yelling "Too soon, Geoff!" A four-panel comic that's a sequel to the previous. Geoff is being accosted by the first man, who says "Hey Geoff, I see you're not wearing a Bone Farmer Memorial Pin?" To which Geoff says "I mean it'd be kind of tough to-" and is cut off by the man saying "It's National Bone Farmer Memorial Day. We're all remembering all the good stuff he did." Geoff replies "Like what? Name one thing," to which the man replies "Shh! I'm remembering it all right now, silently." In the last panel, the man says to Geoff "It's like you don't even know the rules of the day? I'm going to call the cops," as he pulls out his phone.
September 23, 2025 at 3:10 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
Indeed; what Sartre wrote about anti-Semites in 1946 continues to be true for all types of reactionaries:

"They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words."
A quote from Jean Paul-Sartre, from his essay "Anti-Semite and Jew" (1946), that reads: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
September 22, 2025 at 7:20 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
science fact: this is when werewolves are horniest
Screenshot from a weather app showing that the moon phase is at 69%.
September 12, 2025 at 4:20 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
These last three paragraphs really hit the nail on the head.

"[Pundits] are aware of the horrors visited upon Gaza, but to them, those are acceptable losses – bodies, but not real people. [...] It does not count as the 'political violence' so many politicians and pundits rushed to decry yesterday."
Yesterday, many saw images of gruesome violence in their algorithmically generated feeds. Some expressed outrage, acting as though this was an anomaly, and perhaps it was. Perhaps they have not spent the past almost-two years opening Twitter, Bluesky, Instagram or whatever else and being greeted by images of charred Palestinian children. Maybe the endless stream of unspeakable darkness has made them numb. Or maybe, like many pundits and elected officials, they are aware of the horrors visited upon Gaza, but to them, those are acceptable losses – bodies, but not real people. State violence is the background hum of this country, after all. It does not count as the “political violence” so many politicians and pundits rushed to decry yesterday. Kirk’s death, like much of his life, took place on a stage. Despite the artificiality of such a setting, that makes him more real to some Americans – and clearly to those eulogizing him. More real than the Democratic lawmaker and her husband who were killed just a few months ago. More real than the 11 people killed last week by the US government in what was almost certainly an illegal strike on a boat in the Caribbean. More real than tens of thousands – or, more likely, hundreds of thousands – of Palestinian civilians. Kirk’s violent rhetoric helped shape this world, and yet, it has been deemed “civil” by those on both sides of the political divide. This is the mark of a sick society, one that is perfectly fine with an unconscionable body count as long as none of the disfigured, barely recognizable faces are ones we know from a screen. Some of the pundits fake-crying for Kirk probably found his views privately appalling. Again, networks made the deliberate choice to shy away from engaging with the substance of his debates. They were almost certainly aware, at least on some level, of the kinds of things he regularly said. But that didn’t matter. They had to put on a show. The show, after all, is what keeps the meat grinder that is America moving, and it must – at all costs – go on.
September 12, 2025 at 2:14 AM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
I'm reminded of this scene from Star Trek TNG where Dr. Crusher argues with the leader of a resistance cell on an apartheid police state planet. He rightly points out how easy it is for her to moralize about violence, when her ancestors already fought and killed so that her utopia could even exist.
September 11, 2025 at 2:47 AM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
I'm having to dust off my 2016 memes for this thread.

You are, ironically, letting Russia control the way you view domestic politics.
Simpsons meme with Principle Skinner thinking in the first panel "Am I out touch?", and then in the second panel resolutely concluding "No, it's the Russians."
September 7, 2025 at 12:54 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
The dad from Everybody Hates Christ yelling "That's 49 cents of spilled milk dripping all over my table!"
July 2, 2025 at 4:53 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
A photo of a red fox curled up sleeping. Text and arrows state "no legs", "stationary." The bottom text of the meme thus reads "This is a plant."
June 30, 2025 at 9:10 AM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
Normally I'd find a way to edit this down for social media brevity, but I like what I said to some friends on Telegram and so I'll share it in full here too.

May she rest in peace. :(
I always really admired how much tireless, nonstop, every-single-day work running the rescue takes. I always thought "that's so hard, I couldn't do that." Knowing she accomplished so much while struggling with mental health just makes me respect and admire her even more. I remember a video where one of their fur farm rescues, an adult fox, got to actually... walk on grass and ground for the first time in its life. To actually feel the earth beneath its paws for the first time. To be out of a cage for once, to be able to run around and play. It was really beautiful. She transposed so many innocent animals from a life of cruelty and suffering to one of joy and freedom.
June 24, 2025 at 11:16 AM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
If you have the means and want to, they're still raising money for their project to buy out and shut down an entire fur farm. You can find the donation widget next to the YouTube video.

youtu.be/8qlJir9a1zk
YouTube Nonprofit Donation widget that appears next to videos engaged in fundraising for a cause. Text reads: Save 500 foxes and shut down a fur farm! Help us reach our goal and save hundreds of foxes Total raised: $103,618.00 Saveafox, organizer We have the opportunity to shut down a fur farm. A BIG one. We could rescue all 500 foxes, take all of the cages and smash them, and give all of these foxes a chance at life where they can enjoy life, and RUN! But this will require a massive amount of money, for food, vet bills, enrichment, enclosures, and of course...lots of land! Help us pull this off before it's too late, our goal is $700,000! Donation collected by Saveafox Corporation YouTube covers all transaction fees • Nonprofit website "To rescue and provide forever homes for captive-born, non-releasable wildlife"
June 24, 2025 at 11:16 AM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
"self-censoring at work"

you mean... being a professional?

you're there to do a job, not "speak freely." (and considering that the things they're afraid of saying are likely just bigoted remarks: good! you should be afraid!)

do your coworkers a favor and stfu.
White men are 'walking around on eggshells at work, afraid to speak freely: Survey Poll reveals 43% of White men self-censor at work, while 25 million report losing job opportunities due to their race and gender By Rachel del Guidice • Fox News Published June 21, 2025 7:00am EDT Updated June 21, 2025 8:35am EDT
June 23, 2025 at 3:24 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
Meme of AOC with laser-red eyes with text reading "SHUT THE FUCK UP LIBERAL" in a bombastic, over-the-top typeface.
June 22, 2025 at 9:14 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
Furality was beautiful this year. 🧡
VRchat photo of colorful animal avatars in a club DJ space. From left to right, photo features Buppy (DiscordedWhooves), me (MythicalRedFox), and Miles Rotaru. VRchat photo of colorful animal avatars in a club DJ space. From left to right, photo features Chenpai, me (MythicalRedFox), and Buppy (DiscordedWhooves). VRchat photo of colorful animal avatars enjoying a fireworks show, looking up at the night sky. From left to right, photo features Phoebe Doggo, Buppy (DiscordedWhooves), me (MythicalRedFox), and Miles Rotaru. A close-up VRchat photo of my fox avatar at the club world, winking and bleping at the camera, holding a glowstick.
June 10, 2025 at 6:12 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
VRchat rn.

wdfym missing??? go find it!!

#furality
VRchat.com error message that says "Network Missing - Something has gone wrong with the network! Maybe our servers are down, maybe you're offline, maybe it's just a horrifying clown-packed surprise. You could try again? 500: Request failed with status code 500."
June 8, 2025 at 4:05 AM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
happy pride
Some kind of old-timey card with a black cat carrying a suitcase and an umbrella, with the caption (situated below some musical notes on a score) of: "I don't know where I'm going but I'm gay."
June 1, 2025 at 12:24 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
Nooooo 😢
Pocket is shutting down After much thought, we've made the difficult decision to close Pocket. Thanks for being part of the journey. Find out about refunds and how to export your content in our support article.
May 25, 2025 at 1:41 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
perhaps this is just vibes, but the way the headline phrases it vs the way it actually happened come off very differently from one another, imo.
Singh jumped in to ask: “Could we not also say, ostensibly, there hasn’t been a fair primary for the Democrats since 2008? Are they not also a threat to democracy?” “Yes,” Sanders replied. “Fair enough. That is… yeah. I’m not gonna argue with that point. And that’s why I’m proudly an Independent.”
May 20, 2025 at 2:11 AM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
They do. open.substack.com/pub/andymasl...
Two graphs side-by-side. Both graphs are labelled "Water consumed using ChatGPT vs other activities." On the y-axis is Water Consumption, measured in Gallons, and it goes from zero to 750. On the x-axis are various activities. From left to right, we have: roughly 300 ChatGPT queries, which uses roughly 1 gallon of water; one hour of TV in a US home, which uses roughly 4 gallons of water; and finally, one single hamburger, which uses roughly 660 gallons of water. Below the graph are its sources: Li, Ren et al., 2023; U.S. Census Bureau; UNEP. On the right we have the second graph, whose y-axis is still Water Consumption, but this time measured in Millions of Gallons. The y-axis goes from 0 to 14,000. On the x-axis are the activities. From left to right, we have: ChatGPT use globally for one day, which is a minuscule amount barely discernible as even rising past 0 on the graph (which, again, to be fair, is measured in millions of gallons of water consumed); we then have Leaking pipes in the US for one day, which consumes an astronomical amount of water, somewhere past the 10,500 millions of gallons mark. Sources: Liemberger & Wyatt, 2019; Liemberger & Wyatt, 2020. A back of the envelope calculation tells me that the ratio of water use of 1 ChatGPT search compared to 1 burger is the same ratio as the energy use of a 1 mile drive in a sedan compared to the energy used by driving the world’s largest cruise ship for 60 miles. Image: infographic showing that the ratio of energy usage between driving 1 mile in a sedan vs driving 60 miles alone in a cruise ship is the same ratio as the water usage difference between one ChatGPT query and one hamburger. If your friend were about to drive their personal largest ever in history cruise ship solo for 60 miles, but decided to walk 1 mile to the dock instead of driving because they were “concerned about the climate impact of driving” how seriously would you take them? The situation is the same with water use and AI chatbots. There are problems that so completely dwarf individual AI water use that it does not make sense for the climate movement to focus on individual AI use at all.
May 19, 2025 at 1:47 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
The math (and the sources for where the numbers come from) are directly above the 97% claim. The link I shared takes you to the sub-header about this topic.

I should note that all the numbers Masley uses are the same ones people concerned about LLMs' impact use, he just contextualizes them.
Back of the envelope calculation of what percentage of AI energy use is from ChatGPT-like apps ChatGPT gets ~1 billion queries/day. All other chatbots get around ~300–500 million queries/day (combined estimate). Total ≈ 1.3–1.5 billion queries/day. Typical LLM query (like ChatGPT) consumes about 2.9 Wh per query. Daily energy used on LLM chatbot queries: 1.3 billion queries × 2.9 Wh/query ≈ 3,770 MWh/day. Annual inference energy: 3,770 MWh/day × 365 days ≈ 1.38 TWh/year. To amortize the cost of training we need to know the total energy cost of training all the most popular models being used: GPT-3 (1.3 GWh), GPT-4 (~5 GWh), Gemini (~3 GWh), Claude (~0.5 GWh), DeepSeek (~1 GWh), other misc (~1 GWh): total training ≈ ~11 GWh. Assume 2-year lifespan per model → annual amortization ≈ 5.5 GWh/year (0.0055 TWh/year). Training energy ≈ 0.0055 TWh/year, negligible compared to energy used in prompting (less than 1%). Prompts (1.38 TWh) + training (0.0055 TWh) ≈ ~1.4 TWh/year. Global AI data centers used about 40–50 TWh/year in 2024–2025. Assume 50 TWh/year as round estimate for all AI workloads globally. Consumer chatbot share = (1.4 TWh / 50 TWh) × 100% ≈ 2.8%. With uncertainty range, chatbot share is ~2–5%, most likely around 3%. If you think this is wrong I’d be excited to hear about it in the comments or over email and update accordingly.
May 19, 2025 at 1:33 PM
mythicalredfox.bsky.social
Respectfully, yes, because you are making the erroneous assumption that "AI data centers" = ChatGPT, when this is not the case, nor close to it.

This is addressed in the article you're replying to: andymasley.substack.com/p/individual...
97% of the total energy used by AI as of late 2024 is not being used by ChatGPT or similar apps, it’s being used for other services. What are those services? The actual data on which services are using how much energy is fuzzy, but the activities using the most energy are roughly in this order: Recommender Systems - Content recommendation engines and personalization models used by streaming platforms, e-commerce sites, social media feeds, and online advertising networks. Enterprise Analytics & Predictive AI - AI used in business and enterprise settings for data analytics, forecasting, and decision support. Search & Ad Targeting - The machine learning algorithms behind web search engines and online advertising networks. Computer vision - AI tasks involving image and video analysis – often referred to as computer vision. It includes models for image classification, object detection, facial recognition, video content analysis, medical image diagnostics, and content moderation (automatically flagging inappropriate images/videos). Examples are the face recognition algorithms used in photo tagging and surveillance, the object detection in self-driving car systems (though inference for autonomous vehicles largely runs on-board, not in data centers, the training of those models is data-center based), and the vision models that power services like Google Lens or Amazon’s image-based product search. Voice and Audio AI - AI systems that process spoken language or audio signals. The most prominent examples are voice assistants and speech recognition systems – such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and voice-to-text dictation services. A pie chart labelled "AI's total energy use in all data centers." A small blue slice labelled "Chatbots (maximum)" is at 3%, while the other 97% is "All other AI services." The article continues below: ChatGPT and other similar services are not the reason why AI’s energy use has skyrocketed. AI applications are now being used in almost everything we do and increasing the total energy cost of the internet. Even if you convinced every single person who contributed to sending the 1.5 billion prompts chatbots received today to stop using ChatGPT forever, this would barely scratch the surface of AI’s energy use. ChatGPT is not the reason those additional power plants are being built. One fun way to build your intuition on this is to compare how many homes a coal plant can power vs. how many homes’ worth of energy ChatGPT is using. Reported energy use implies that ChatGPT consumes about as much energy as 20,000 American homes. An average US coal plant generates enough energy for 80,000 American homes every day. This means that even if OpenAI decided to power every one of its billion ChatGPT queries per day entirely on coal, all those queries together would only need one quarter of a single coal plant. ChatGPT is not the reason new coal plants are being opened to power AI data centers. A graph on data center power demand forecasted to 2030, from Goldman Sachs. The graph shows that data center usage in both the US and the rest of the world is rising and will continue to grow significantly. But the graph also shows that when you factor all AI services out of these trend lines, they are only marginally affected. This demonstrates that the data shows that AI is not, in fact, driving the growth of data centers worldwide. Even the article I took this graph from is titled “AI to drive 165% increase in data center power demand by 2030.” I think what’s happening in the discourse is a lot of people regularly see titles like that, assume that AI is not only “driving” the 165% increase but is the only cause, and that ChatGPT is the main reason AI energy use is increasing. Both of these are wrong. According to the graph above, AI will contribute ~200 of the ~650 TWh of energy increase in data centers. The rest will come from more people accessing the internet and other data center services. By 2030, AI will be about 20% of the energy used in data centers, and if trends hold chatbots will be about 3% of that energy, or 0.6% of the energy used in data centers. Since data centers will use about 20% of the world’s energy, ChatGPT and other chatbots will use about 0.12% of the world’s energy. It’s estimated that YouTube currently uses 1% of the world’s energy, so if AI grows at the rate experts expect, by 2030 chatbots will use about 1/10th as much of the global energy budget as YouTube’s current share. If you’re concerned about ChatGPT, you should be at least ten times as concerned about YouTube. Obviously both of these would be a waste of time for the environmental movement. There are much bigger culprits in global emissions (our food systems, transportation, and failing to switch to green energy sources) and therefore much more powerful levers we can pull to save the climate.
May 19, 2025 at 1:03 PM