This morning, the news broke that Larian Studios, developer of Baldur's Gate 3 and the upcoming, just-announced Divinity, is apparently using generative AI behind the scenes. The backlash has been swift, and now Larian founder and game director Swen Vincke is responding to clarify his remarks.
It’s even more complicated than that: “AI” is not even a well-defined term. Back when Quake 3 was still in beta (“the demo”), id Software held a competition to develop “bot AIs” that could be added to a server so players would have something to play against while they waited for more people to join (or you could have players VS bots style matches).
That was over 25 years ago. What kind of “AI” do you think was used back then? 🤣
The AI hater extremists seem to be in two camps:
Data center haters
AI-is-killing-jobs
The data center haters are the strangest, to me. Because there’s this default assumption that data centers can never be powered by renewable energy and that AI will never improve to the point where it can all be run locally on people’s PCs (and other, personal hardware).
Yet every day there’s news suggesting that local AI is performing better and better. It seems inevitable—to me—that “big AI” will go the same route as mainframes.
Power source is only one impact. Water for cooling is even bigger. There are data centers pumping out huge amounts of heat in places like AZ, TX, CA where water is scarce and temps are high.
Is the water “consumed” when used for this purpose? I don’t know how data centers do it but it wouldn’t seem that it would need to be constantly drawing water from a local system. They could even source it from elsewhere if necessary.
Some use up the water through evaporation, so they constantly draw water. Some “consume” the water, meaning they have a closed system of cooling water, but that uses a lot more electricity than evaporative cooling, which also uses water to generate.
Closed loop systems are expensive. A lot of them are literally spraying water directly on to heat exchangers. And they often pull directly from city drinking water. As some Texas towns have been asked to reduce water consumption so the data center doesn’t run out
Data centers typically use closed loop cooling systems but those do still lose a bit of water each day that needs to be replaced. It’s not much—compared to the size of the data center—but it’s still a non-trivial amount.
A study recently came out (it was talked about extensively on the Science VS podcast) that said that a long conversation with an AI chat bot (e.g. ChatGPT) could use up to half a liter of water—in the worst case scenario.
This statistic has been used in the news quite a lot recently but it’s a bad statistic: That water usage counts the water used by the power plant (for its own cooling). That’s typically water that would come from ponds and similar that would’ve been built right alongside the power plant (your classic “cooling pond”). So it’s not like the data centers are using 0.5L of fresh water that could be going to people’s homes.
For reference, the actual data center water usage is 12% of that 0.5L: 0.06L of water (for a long chat). Also remember: This is the worst-case scenario with a very poorly-engineered data center.
Another stat from the study that’s relevant: Generating images uses much less energy/water than chat. However, generating videos uses up an order of magnitude more than both (combined).
So if you want the lowest possible energy usage of modern, generative AI: Use fast (low parameter count), open source models… To generate images 👍
colloquially today most people mean genAI like LLMs when they say “AI” for brevity.
Because there’s this default assumption that data centers can never be powered by renewable energy
that’s not the point at all. the point is, even before AI, our increasing energy needs were outpacing our ability/willingness to switch to green energy. Even then we were using more fossil fuels than at any point in the history of the world. Now AI is just adding a whole other layer of energy demand on top of that.
sure, maybe, eventually, we will power everything with green energy, but… we aren’t actually doing that, and we don’t have time to catch up. every bit longer it takes us to eliminate fossil fuels will add to negative effects on our climate and ecosystems.
The power use from AI is orthogonal to renewable energy. From the news, you’d think that AI data centers have become the number one cause of global warming. Yet, they’re not even in the top 100. Even at the current pace of data center buildouts, they won’t make the top 100… ever.
AI data center power utilization is a regional problem specific to certain localities. It’s a bad idea to build such a data center in certain places but companies do it anyway (for economic reasons that are easy to fix with regulation). It’s not a universal problem across the globe.
Aside: I’d like to point out that the fusion reactor designs currently being built and tested were created using AI. Much of the advancements in that area are thanks to “AI data centers”. If fusion power becomes a reality in the next 50 years it’ll have more than made up for any emissions from data centers. From all of them, ever.
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It’s even more complicated than that: “AI” is not even a well-defined term. Back when Quake 3 was still in beta (“the demo”), id Software held a competition to develop “bot AIs” that could be added to a server so players would have something to play against while they waited for more people to join (or you could have players VS bots style matches).
That was over 25 years ago. What kind of “AI” do you think was used back then? 🤣
The AI hater extremists seem to be in two camps:
The data center haters are the strangest, to me. Because there’s this default assumption that data centers can never be powered by renewable energy and that AI will never improve to the point where it can all be run locally on people’s PCs (and other, personal hardware).
Yet every day there’s news suggesting that local AI is performing better and better. It seems inevitable—to me—that “big AI” will go the same route as mainframes.
Power source is only one impact. Water for cooling is even bigger. There are data centers pumping out huge amounts of heat in places like AZ, TX, CA where water is scarce and temps are high.
Is the water “consumed” when used for this purpose? I don’t know how data centers do it but it wouldn’t seem that it would need to be constantly drawing water from a local system. They could even source it from elsewhere if necessary.
https://thecurrentga.org/2025/08/26/data-centers-consume-massive-amounts-of-water-companies-rarely-tell-the-public-exactly-how-much/
Some use up the water through evaporation, so they constantly draw water. Some “consume” the water, meaning they have a closed system of cooling water, but that uses a lot more electricity than evaporative cooling, which also uses water to generate.
Closed loop systems are expensive. A lot of them are literally spraying water directly on to heat exchangers. And they often pull directly from city drinking water. As some Texas towns have been asked to reduce water consumption so the data center doesn’t run out
Data centers typically use closed loop cooling systems but those do still lose a bit of water each day that needs to be replaced. It’s not much—compared to the size of the data center—but it’s still a non-trivial amount.
A study recently came out (it was talked about extensively on the Science VS podcast) that said that a long conversation with an AI chat bot (e.g. ChatGPT) could use up to half a liter of water—in the worst case scenario.
This statistic has been used in the news quite a lot recently but it’s a bad statistic: That water usage counts the water used by the power plant (for its own cooling). That’s typically water that would come from ponds and similar that would’ve been built right alongside the power plant (your classic “cooling pond”). So it’s not like the data centers are using 0.5L of fresh water that could be going to people’s homes.
For reference, the actual data center water usage is 12% of that 0.5L: 0.06L of water (for a long chat). Also remember: This is the worst-case scenario with a very poorly-engineered data center.
Another stat from the study that’s relevant: Generating images uses much less energy/water than chat. However, generating videos uses up an order of magnitude more than both (combined).
So if you want the lowest possible energy usage of modern, generative AI: Use fast (low parameter count), open source models… To generate images 👍
colloquially today most people mean genAI like LLMs when they say “AI” for brevity.
that’s not the point at all. the point is, even before AI, our increasing energy needs were outpacing our ability/willingness to switch to green energy. Even then we were using more fossil fuels than at any point in the history of the world. Now AI is just adding a whole other layer of energy demand on top of that.
sure, maybe, eventually, we will power everything with green energy, but… we aren’t actually doing that, and we don’t have time to catch up. every bit longer it takes us to eliminate fossil fuels will add to negative effects on our climate and ecosystems.
The power use from AI is orthogonal to renewable energy. From the news, you’d think that AI data centers have become the number one cause of global warming. Yet, they’re not even in the top 100. Even at the current pace of data center buildouts, they won’t make the top 100… ever.
AI data center power utilization is a regional problem specific to certain localities. It’s a bad idea to build such a data center in certain places but companies do it anyway (for economic reasons that are easy to fix with regulation). It’s not a universal problem across the globe.
Aside: I’d like to point out that the fusion reactor designs currently being built and tested were created using AI. Much of the advancements in that area are thanks to “AI data centers”. If fusion power becomes a reality in the next 50 years it’ll have more than made up for any emissions from data centers. From all of them, ever.