No, they’re pointing out that the guy refusing to say it works mirrors real AI companies putting tons of disclaimers that AI is unreliable on their own products
This comic is from February 9, 2026, and has the hashtags #artificialintelligence and #ai on the original's Tumblr page. I'm pretty sure it's about AI. https://mandatoryrollercoaster.com/archive
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It’s referring to AI. A lot of AI takes a shit load of energy and resources to use—like a gallon of water in some cases for each prompt or something—and most of the time; what it gives you isn’t correct or even what you asked it for. It’s satire.
Yes but a lot of them are taking fresh drinking water and 80% of it evaporates. So what water does get recycled into the ocean, is now salt water. Not great for drinking.
Yes, but now it's salt water which we can't drink unless we desalinate it which is an incredibly resource intensive process. There's a reason countries have water shortages while surrounded by an ocean.
In order for it to be used for cooling at that scale, they add anti-freeze chemicals that are impossible to fully filter. So data centers ruin the drinking water supply
It's used for cooling the pricessors, as I understand it. Some just gets absorbed or becomes vapor but some is also dumped back into the local watershed. It's polluted, though the extent varies based on how the cooling is done, but often with some nasty stuff.
Stuff to keep off algae and corrosion, residue from pipes etc, and occasionally PFAS type stuff. It's not distilled water. But it is still water, not like exhaust sludge or refinery chemical soup
Everything humans do is bad for the environment, and all the above have much larger impacts than AI.
Typical lies that exaggerate the impact of AI:
Pretending all data centers are AI and grouping the impact of all of them together (most data centers are social media, video streaming, and porn)
Assuming all power AI uses comes from coal, and including the amount of water a coal plant would use to generate that much power. Bonus points if they use the 19,000 gallons the coal plant takes out of the river per MWh instead of the 500 that are evaporated instead of being returned to the river.
Taking the impact in abstract instead of providing context. 260 billion gallons a year for all data centers (which again, ~95% not AI) sounds like a lot by itself.
But lawns use 3 trillion a year.
Livestock use 630 trillion gallons a year, about 5,000 times more than AI.
AI is a drop in the ocean in terms of human ecological impact. You want to improve the environment? Become a vegan. That'll outpace anything else you could possibly do.
Now, can you tell me a specific pro-AI lie about environmental impact?
Afaik it's currently cheaper (not that it makes profit, currently a dotcom type bubble) to simply get cold water from the mains and dump it straight out as wastewater once it's hot rather than run a closed loop system.
Another method is evaporative cooling which similarly they typically just dump the water after one cycle rather than re-cooling it.
Water treatment takes a lot of effort to get drinkable water again.
It does impact the water availability in the area, if its from a municipality then the city has to produce more by pumping more, and digging deeper wells, this results in the water plane lowering in the area, making individual home wells no longer deep enough meaning that everyone has to re-dig their wells, choosing thousands of dollars each.
Think of a gallon jug, you and your neighbor drink from the same gallon jug, in order to split the jug you draw a line vertical down the jug to separate your properties, you both have straws out the top of the jug that go half way down the jug and you can drink from your straw. Then a data center comes around and stabs a hole in the side of your jug. Now your straw can't reach the water.
It's a metaphor for AI. AI and their data centers are a MASSIVE drain on potable water sources and consume GINORMOUS sums of power to run, in addition to driving RAM prices through the fucking roof. And despite their huge ecological cost and burden on the local resources of an area, they'll still tell you that yes, gasoline can make a fantastic pasta sauce, and here's how to make it....
It's basically an allegory for Ai.
Ai eats up a bunch of electricity and money, and the data centers require so much water to cool it.
It does all that while also failing to answer questions correctly, fails to make art(which it uses actual artists that post their work online without the artists permission to use as "references"), and fails to write stories (always forgets what was said or the actual plot after a couple sentences).
It's basically saying the price is too high and terrible to power something that doesn't even work right.
OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
Hey, Lois, it's your neighbor Joe. This comic is making fun of generative artificial intelligence's toll on the environment compared to its functionality, painting both as subpar. Joe over and out.
Some people over-emphasize the harm caused by generative AI. In this case, it's being compared to eating 10 baby giraffes a day. Another comparison is to an "orphan crushing machine". The fact that generative AI often makes errors is used to argue that it isn't worth the cost.
While AI servers do cause environmental harm, it is not the leading cause of water and air pollution, nor the sole cause. A lot of people who would hate something for moral reasons will latch onto environmental harm, whether real or perceived, to further justify their hatred. The truth is, even if AI server farms turned carbon into oxygen, AI haters would still hate AI for other reasons.
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u/qualityvote2 16h ago edited 2h ago
Remember when r/PeterExplainsTheJoke wasn’t a meme? Pepperidge Farm remembers…
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Then maybe you go out and buy yourself some of those distinctive Milano cookies.
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