The operation of data centers to process artificial intelligence is projected to use a huge amount of electricity and water for cooling. How many gigawatts of electricity is iNaturalist using for its operation? I hate to think that iNat is causing nuclear power plants to be built. Or a solar power…

[image] nickharby: I hate to think that iNat is causing nuclear power plants to be built I dislike AI for the most part, but if AI is what drives a switch to nuclear power, then I’m all for it. Nuclear is likely the only realistic form of clean energy that can support the demands of the power…

From the post that @thomaseverest linked to: [image] Carbon Footprint of iNaturalist It’s an interesting question, but a complicated one, and honestly not one we have the resources to answer in a quantitative fashion (assuming that’s even possible) [image] Carbon Footprint of iNaturalist T…

A few points here: I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that iNat’s CV AI is a lot less intensive to run than today’s state-of-the-art giant LLMs. iNat’s user base is large, but still orders of magnitude smaller than major AI platforms’ (~300k active users compared to ~400m for OpenAI, ~20m for C…

[image] nickharby: I hate to think that iNat is causing nuclear power plants to be built From an environmental perspective nuclear power is absolutely the way to go. Vastly less impact than pretty much every other power source. The anti-nuclear crowd and the fear around it has done immense …

Not all AI is equivalent to generative AI, and not all AI (or things that are now being called AI due to the current hype around it) is bad. Obviously, there is some processing power and server power required for the CV to work, and to host all the images, etc. And quantifying exactly how much that …

Personally I am in support of nuclear power, but I still don’t like the idea of nuclear power plants being built solely for AI. And that is happening, for example a nuclear plant near my hometown is reopening solely to provide power just for a single company’s AI. I’d rather we didn’t keep adding to…

I think the environmental impact of AI is somewhat overblown, too. There are many other things that are far, far more of a problem.

This question is kind of assuming that people would be doing something less consumptive if they weren’t using inat, and I don’t think I would.

[image] raymie: the environmental impact of AI is somewhat overblown While I agree that there are bigger problems that need to be addressed, I would suggest that, if anything, the environmental impact of widespread AI use has been massively underreported and that it’s a far larger issue than …

Is the iNaturalist use of artificial intelligence damaging this planet?

General

thomaseverest April 21, 2025, 12:19am 2

You may be interested in this thread and those linked in it:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/carbon-footprint-of-inaturalist/11126

Topic		Replies	Views
Carbon Footprint of iNaturalist General	14	3489	April 3, 2020
AI's impact on nature, what are the pros and cons? Nature Talk	30	1159	October 14, 2024
Should I try to be frugal with iNaturalist's bandwidth? General question	31	1677	August 25, 2024
What is this - iNaturalist and generative AI? General	812	30525	December 22, 2025
What would make AI on iNaturalist tolerable to you? General ai	96	4290	October 31, 2025

Is the iNaturalist use of artificial intelligence damaging this planet?

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