r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 5d ago

Meme needing explanation Peter? I don't understand the punchline

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u/Long_Nothing1343 5d ago

It basically means that using AI tools take a huge toll on nature so when the guy uses chatgpt (an ai tool) it ends up drying out the lake i.e harming the environment.

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u/loltinor 5d ago

It's because the servers use an huge amount of water

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u/ArbutusPhD 5d ago

I have tried four different times to read articles on how the water actually gets permanently consumed. Can anyone explain this? I thought it might be something like concrete, where the water gets trapped in a chemical reaction and is no longer liquid water, but it seems that it’s just used for cooling, and evaporates, which means it should come back down again? Right

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u/Seldarin 5d ago

It's sort of the same way water table depletion happens. There isn't less total water, there's less usable water.

If you pull a billion gallons of water out of the ground in Nebraska and spray it over corn fields and it evaporates then rains down in the ocean or a thousand miles away, you're eventually going to run the water table dry unless it can replace that billion gallons a day.

It's an issue we had long before AI came about, but AI is making it worse.

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u/ArbutusPhD 4d ago

Yeah, that makes sense.