AI is the most important new issue on the agenda and it’s not great that the leading approaches are: 1. Do whatever big tech wants 2. Make stuff up about water use I think we can do better!

I think there's way too much pessimism about the possibility of convincing people to change their object level views. On AI and the environment, animal welfare, and mainstream econ, my experience has been that 9 out of 10 people are open to good arguments.

This was great www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...

I'd really like to get the "AI water is being hyped up as a problem by the labs because it's so obviously stupid it invalidates AI critics' more serious complaints" people and the "Andy's in the pocket of the labs because he's questioning the AI water issue" people together in the same room

Blog's closing in on 5000 subs if anyone would like to help me clear the hurdle... andymasley.substack.com

My final take on the Oregon data center "giving people cancer" that I think is pretty decisive: the math makes it really hard to see how this could possibly be responsible for even 1% of the increase in nitrate concentration in the groundwater.

Realized that calculation I posted can't be right, sorry fam will update.

Fake problems obscure real problem, so we should care about which are fake

Having grown up in a small town and also been around a lot of people in tech, it is hard to describe just how little "Big tech's evil values are squaring off against honest small town citizens" lands with me at all. Deep evil can lurk in rural and suburban America.

In these conversations I sometimes want to just take people and say "Look... just walk around and observe the ways water is being used around you. We're already using so much! Why are you comparing these buildings to how much you personally drink?"

"Hey let's report on farmers adding pollution to a water supply so bad it causes cancer, frame an unrelated actor and put cancer cells over an image of him" This is so disrespectful to the victims. The people actually causing the cancer should be socially punished, not get off free. Insane.

"When someone's done something bad, we expect that they produce a great work of art" wtf?

Textbook war crime/extrajudicial killing "Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck. The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack ... ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions." Report by @alexhorton.bsky.social @ellenwapo.bsky.social o.bsky.social

Out of curiosity I decided to try and run the numbers on how much Netflix you can watch for the energy cost of a ChatGPT prompt As far as I can tell it's between 5.1 and 10.2 seconds, depending on which end of the 2019 IEA Netflix energy usage estimate you use simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/29/...

There's this complete inability for anyone in the press to conceptualize people involved with food as being bad people or even just doing bad things so we have more and more of these ridiculously stupid stories blaming randos instead of someone involved in food.

Two great paragraphs to internalize

Giant utility refuses to build out capacity to address growth, instead collects greater fees at lower costs until things come to a head; blames bogeyman. News at 11

Exhibit 9821 in "It is actually very bad to lie to environmentalists because this will always cause worse environmental choices to be made"

Getting swarmed by communists is honestly kind of really funny. Like oh yeah you guys are still around.

👇

One day all turkeys will be pardoned

Sometimes I feel jealous of people who haven’t used LLMs at all. Imagine the first LLM you talk to being like Opus 6 and you get the full impact of progress at once

Some people are drawing an inference that because I'm an EA I'm also a capitalist who believes large private companies should be able to purchase water from utilities, so I'm going to come right out and say that yes to all that.

This one’s real yeah. Putting it in my bio

Some people have noticed that I’m involved with effective altruism. I was really trying to keep that hidden!

The Straussian undercurrent of all my writing is "Farmers: not always great"

Just one of those nights www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cce...

Rolling Stone recently ran a really terrible headline that lets a huge environmental bad guy off the hook for giving people cancer. I'm already ratioing them on Twitter but would appreciate some eyes here as well

Crazy who you bump into at the airport

If you don't want to go to bat for AI but would like a data center like issue to be driven crazy about, look no further than: grid batteries www.wbur.org/news/2025/11...

AOC NO NOT THE MIT STUDY

I think this incident reflects badly on the broader institutions currently covering AI and the environment. I should absolutely not have been the first person to notice this. From the end of the post:

The author of Empire of AI got back to me, which I’m very grateful for, but unfortunately her response 100% confirmed that the central claim I call a mistake is wrong, and even showed me how it happened: her source mistyped meters cubed as liters. Kind of a wild discovery to make. Link below

I'm so confused about this

This is the single most massive factual error in a major book I've ever personally noticed on my own, and I think I'm the first person to catch it? Empire of AI asserts that a data center is using 1000x as much water as a city. In reality, it's 22% of the city's water.

New post: I think Empire of AI has the worst coverage of AI/water that I've read. I discovered one massive factual error where the author gets a number wrong by 3 orders of magnitude. In every place water's mentioned, the reader is left understanding less andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-...

Okay another unpopular take. Qualifying this with saying: 1) I support basically open borders. 2) This guy did something really terrible and should go to prison for a long time. But I actually do think online doxxing is a form of cruel unusual punishment that even murderers don't deserve.

Recently received some strong criticism of my AI water use article on Lobsters here: lobste.rs/s/lywf8s/ai_... My reply here if anyone's interested:

Learning the hard way a few times that if you leave any indication that you found a source using ChatGPT people will eagerly dismiss the entire thing. I use ChatGPT as basically a super powered search and double-check all my sources. Looks like this is still pretty commonly disqualifying

Okay folks, after doing some digging I have determined that everyone complaining about AI using precious potable water specifically have no clue what they're talking about. Will finish this soon.

Good nudge that I'll circle back on. As a point of comparison, all AI in America in 2023 used about as much water as 8x my hometown of 16,000's water supply. All that water is also potable. So it was equivalent to adding ~8 of my hometowns. I don't expect this to change the situation but will see

The difficulty of talking about whether "tech" is good is that some people use it to mean short form video content turning everyone far right and others use it to mean GMOs and the ability for far-off different people to communicate at all

Preach

My new favorite thing I've made with AI: Every Mountain Goats song before 2006 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePNm...

I reference this image like once a week

I shared a short succinct summary of my core strongest arguments that using chatbots is definitely not bad for the environment you can share with skeptical people in your life andymasley.substack.com/p/a-short-su...