#qrts with 300k rts and likes and snappy comments

[lotus-tower]

yes if I were to use an ai generator I would be contributing to a machine that consumes an incredible amount of water and power. but the truth is, that may or may not be offset by, say, having cancelled my ffxiv subscription. we don’t know how much water and power is consumed for the sake of MMO servers. we simply don’t have that information. how much water would we save by shutting down league of legends, WoW, ffxiv, and other games that require massive servers? a while back, ffxiv was scrambling to obtain new servers as player numbers surged because the pandemic had created a shortage of parts required for building servers. what does that imply? potentially all sorts of things. but the thing is I doubt the vast majority of ffxiv players have thought much about it, or care to. we simply don’t know the energy costs of maintaining and playing games.

we have estimates for how much power is consumed by gaming consoles—with some estimates being astronomical. but we don’t know for sure, because the data is just not there. and we know even less for the industry side of things. what’s for sure is that gaming, like basically everything else we do in modern society, takes a huge amount of water and electricity, an amount that would be very uncomfortable to look.

is WoW, ffxiv, league of legends worth it? I think most of us would agree that gaming is a frivolous expense, a luxury. but many people also spend a lot of time arguing that games are art. in the end, it doesn’t really matter. I think most people would disagree with the idea that “games shouldn’t exist” because they consume too much water and energy, or because the majority of them are built off the exploitation of artists and workers who don’t get to own what they create, or because many, many games are kinda shit.

fundamentally, trying to delineate the moral and spiritual boundaries of art is a waste of time and usually anchored in something deeply reactionary. anti-generative ai arguments centered around its right to existence are an even more colossal waste of time, because it already exists, and things don’t have a “right” to exist, they just either exist or don’t.

but what I think is a lot more frustrating and insidious is the way that people will take something as important as environmental critiques of capitalism and carve things out to tunnel vision on a specific thing they don’t like. everything is a headline screenshot, everything is just a single spotlight illuminating The Thing. how can you segment and partition environmental impacts, of all things?

i mean ultimately generative AI is quite literally the definition of a first world problem. it’s just even more reckless energy consumption from the first world, and if they didn’t spend it on AI they’d spend it on something even more stupid. and the people who pay the price for the environmental cost won’t be us. the people who will feel the lack of water most won’t be us.