The environmental impact would still be as bad, it would still spout out misinformation, it would still scrape for art against people's will, the images would still be shit and not art anyway, and would still make an intellectual sinkhole.
If society isn't built around competition and exploitation, the usage of AI can be limited to renewable energy. Whereas now, every gram of hydrocarbon and uranium will be burned to win the race for global domination.
Great you ignored my other issues with that, but also you don't think people would collectively be using those resources? Also the water used for those ai servers isn't great.
You remember the water cycle from elementary school? You just described it. Well, there isn't an infinite amount of water on earth. So when you take water out of the water cycle and lock it away, like in jugs of water or in cooling systems for massive computers, it doesn't get evaporated and return to the environment. It stays in its jug.
So the more people store water away, the less water we have to use elsewhere.
As for the timeline, this is already happening now.
They go into more detail in the video. It's long but it is funny.
If there's 20% less water in the ecosystem that means 20% less freshwater. This can also cascade because if a pond or something loses too much it might not recover. So taking a lot of water out of the ecosystem is really bad for us.
I mean building out renewable energy still has a negative impact on the environment, whether it be silicon for solar panels or concrete for hydro electric dams. Not to mention all the water that gets used to cool the massive data centers or the materials needed to create the computer components used in the data center. So sure you could lessen the environmental impact by shifting to renewables but it would definitely still be there. Reducing usage will always be the best way to help the environment, there's a reason it comes first in Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
Hate this dumbass meme. All of the worlds datacenters only use like 3% of our energy. You can do more by skipping one shopping weekend than entire lifetime of AI use.