Boston_Baz
When we talk as if a few years of AI build‑out are “killing the planet” while long‑standing sectors that make up double‑digit shares of global emissions are treated as the natural background, we’re not doing climate politics, we’re doing scapegoating. The numbers just don’t support that narrative.
The IEA and others are clear: the trajectory is worrying (data‑center demand doubling, AI the main driver), but present‑day AI still accounts for a single‑digit percent of electricity, not a primary causal driver.
>Nobody's mad at LLMs either. It's the companies that control them and that are fueling the AI "arms race", that are the problem.
That’s what people say, yet when asked or given the opportunity, the literature shows they’re perfectly willing to “harm” and “punish” LLMs and social robots.
Corporations are absolutely the primary locus of power and responsibility (read: root of all evil) here, none of this denies AI’s energy risks, social harms, or the likelihood that deployments will push more people into precarity (read: homelessness) in 2026. The point is about where the anger actually lands in practice.
Even when it’s narratively framed as being “about” companies and climate policy, that anger is increasingly channeled through interactions with the models themselves. People insult them, threaten them, talk about “punishing” them, and argue over what they “deserve”, that's not "Nobody being mad at the LLMs", that's treating something as a socially legible agent.
So people can say they’re not mad at AI models, but their behavior tells a very different story.
TL;DR: Between those who think LLMs have “inner lights” and feelings and deserve moral patient‑hood, and those who insist they’re just “stochastic parrots” that are “killing the planet,” both camps have already installed them as socially legible agents and treat them accordingly. As AI “relationships” grow, so do hate‑filled interactions framed in terms of “harm,” abuse, and “punishment” directed at the systems/models themselves.
[https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/robotics-and-ai/article...]
[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9951994/]
[https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/robotics-and-ai/article...]
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002772...]
[https://fortune.com/2025/10/30/being-mean-to-chatgpt-can-boo...]
The fact is that AI, by any definable metric, is only a sliver of the global energy supply right now. Outside the social media hype, what actual climate scientists and orgs talk about isn't (mostly) what AI is consuming now, it's what the picture looks like within the next decade. THAT is the real horror show if we don't pull policy levers. Anyone who says that AI energy consumption is "killing the planet" is either intentionally misleading the argument or unbelievably misinformed. What's actually, factually "killing the planet" are energy/power, heavy industry (steel, cement, chemicals), transport, and agriculture/land use. AI consumption is a rounding error compared to these. We'll ignore the fact AI is actually being used to manage DC energy efficiency and has reduced the energy consumption at some hyperscale DC's (Amazon, AliBaba, Alphabet, Microsoft) by up to 40%, making it one of the only industry sectors that has a real, non-trivial chance at net-zero if deployed at scale.
The most interesting thing about this whole paradigm is just how deep of a grasp AI (specifically LLMs) have on the collective social gullet. It's like nothing I've ever been a part of. When Deep Water Horizon blew up and spilled 210M gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, people (rightfully so) got pissed at BP and Transocean.
Nobody, from what I remember, got angry at the actual, physical metal structure.
I was stunned when it was announced. I mean having contradicting tariffs and goals is one thing, but semis?! Wonder if this will finally get Intel their first Intl. buyer for their semis.