this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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The internet and AI are two different things.
The internet wasn’t taking your drinking water 5 years ago and it’s not taking it today.
lol the internet is 70% bot traffic today
wanna bet more and more of that is ai driven?
The things using the internet is irrelevant. The fact remains that the internet itself is not taking your drinking water
i’m always amazed how it can be so hard for some people to think beyond whatever is immediately in their face
70% of the internet traffic is the fucking internet
just because you don’t like that doesn't matter
Internet traffic is not the internet. Thats like saying cars and trucks are the highway. I can’t believe I have to dumb this down for you, but here goes: T highway is that asphalt thing that sits on the ground between two places, right? And cars and trucks are the things you drive on the highway. So like, in terms of emissions, the highway isn’t producing all those nasty emissions, the cars and trucks are. So if you don’t like those nasty emissions, you can regular the cars and trucks, but the highway isn’t at fault. You could reduce the emissions of the vehicles, replace the cars with more efficient busses, you could even just ride bikes on the highway if you really wanted to. But all these things are separate from the highway itself, see?
Just because you don’t understand how any of this works doesn’t change the fact of the matter which is that the internet is not taking your drinking water.
i don’t care about fucking semantics, life must be complicated for you if you are this hung up on literals
it’s amazing you can be so close as to use cars and highways and yet be so damn blind to history and the parallel implications
This isn't about semantics, you're just a dumbass.
zzzz
Yeah, exactly. Not a single thought in your brain.
because arguing with you is a waste of time
Yeah, you really are wasting your time by spouting so much nonsense
It's not semantics you fucking clod. They just gave an incredibly apt analogy in an attempt to explain how things actually work but you continue on with your ass-sourced "70% of the intetz iz botz hurr durr" shit without even attempting to understand why you're dead fucking wrong.
for a fucking 5 year old lmao
It’s not semantics, the context of this entire thread is about the difference in ecological impact of two entirely different and unrelated technologies. This isn’t a philosophical debate. Life must be so difficult for you if you can’t ever see the forest for the trees because you can’t see things as they are.
unrelated lol
this is the hang up
how have the lot of you not been paying attention to what is going on with the internet?
even conservative reports pre ai put the bot traffic at over half the total data volume, trying to pretend you can divorce the internet from ai is some silly head in sand shit
there is no ai without the internet, where is the data being scraped from?
why are small time sites choking with spider traffic?
we can’t use the internet without tripping over ai
all these data centers are being built in butt fuck nowhere, this only works with internet infrastructure to carry data to population centers, no one is investing billions for local kansas access for fuck sake
Are you some kind of schizophrenic? I need to know before I engage with you any further
You're putting a lot of effort into deflecting from the problem. You're pretending to be upset about bot traffic, but instead of saying "we need to regulate AI or put limits on its development or halt all future AI builds or shut down the ones that already exist" you're just doubling down that "No, the internet is the problem. Kill the internet. Pay no attention to the AI datacenters behind the curtain, just shut down the internet."
It's like a doctor says "You have an infection" so the patient asks if the doctor is going to give him antibiotics to kill the infection and the doctor goes "NO, DUMBASS! DID YOU NOT HEAR ME? YOU HAVE AN INFECTION. BACTERIA IS TRAVELING THROUGH YOUR BLOODSTREAM. WE ARE GOING TO EUTHANIZE YOU! GOD, HOW STUPID ARE YOU? CAN YOU NOT SEE THE REALITY THAT THERE IS BACTERIA IN YOUR BODY AND WE MUST PUT YOU DOWN???? I'M NOT HERE TO ARGUE ABOUT SEMANTICS!!!!!"
it’s not happening, the internet as we grew up with it is dead, you and me are not worth shit compared to the money being spent daily on ai
it’s just more of the same shit situation with computer ram
how much of the US gdp is nvda again?
stop putting arguments in mouth, i’m not happy about it but i can see the reality on the wall
the internet is a means for ai, everything else is entirely secondary for the last 3 years easily
More red herrings from you that I'm not going to engage with. You can't just throw out "Oh yeah? Well cancer is bad, gotcha!" when you're losing an argument about health insurance.
I'm not putting any arguments in your mouth. This is how this chain started:
Someone literally pointed out the nuance of the situation, that not all datacenters are for AI and some provide public goods that we all rely on. And you were basically like "No, the internet is full of bots. Shut it all down!"
No one here is arguing for AI datacenters. We're saying not all datacenters are AI, and that's factually true but you can't seem to get it through your head.
By your own definition, then AI is now the internet. Prompts and outputs are the cars and trucks, while the data centers and models are the highway. 70% of the internet is running on data centers and models. What makes more of something, 30% or 70%?
Not even. The internet is the highway. The datacenters running the internet are the department of transportation. Average internet users are the compact hybrids, EVs, and cyclists who use the road. Prompts and outputs are the couriers driving various kinds of vehicles. AI datacenters are the giant trucks with smokestacks that smokescreen all the old grannies behind them.
The prompts and outputs traveling over the internet consume a negligible amount of energy. The bulk of it is consumed by training giant LLMs with hundreds of billions of parameters. A lesser portion is consumed by the inferencing those models do to produce outputs, which is done at the AI datacenters, and not what travels over the internet via internet datacenters.
You’ve misunderstood. AI datacenters are not the highway. Prompts and Outputs are the cars and trucks, the AI data centers are the factories making the cars. The highway is datacenters and transmission media that do not house AI and do not require the immense cooling or power that the AI datacenters use. The highway and the things on the highway are two entirely decoupled things.
human transportation in the abstract is the internet
data is people
data packets / rates (related tech) are the various vehicle types
there was a time of no highways, what need do horse drawn carriages have for paved asphalt?
highways are a direct though not immediate consequence of American car and civic planning policy
if instead we had focused on mixed use walkable cities with connected mass transit instead of urban sprawl highways would be much reduced if not gone, just look at existing examples in eu etc
so yes American cars and every nuance that implies in our current American reality are fucking highways
Incorrect. Let me help you out here:
Human transportation in the abstract is computer networking in the abstract.
The highway is the internet, the current physical implementation of the computer networking transportation system we call The Internet.
You can go into minute detail on what the cars and trucks are, horse drawn carriages, people etc, but ultimately, the internet is the highway. It is separate from and fundamentally not responsible for what you choose to put on it.
my whole fucking point is that roads in the US didn't start with highways
highways in the US came about because of American car culture and fossil fuel policy
so American cars are American highways as far as how intertwined they are, this idea is so old it is literally a plot point in fucking Roger Rabbit
the internet today isn't the internet 5 years ago, you the end personal user is no longer the focus of the infrastructure in the same way no one gives a shit about the horse drawn buggy
the internet we have now is designed for bots, you can thank google and meta and the like
it has accelerated to ludicrous speeds this year if you are paying attention and dead internet theory already had shit pegged as high as in the 60s before the ai boom
You are spiraling further and further into abject insanity. Whatever meds are on you need to take them
You're missing the point so hard it's not even funny.
The datacenters hosting the internet are not the same datacenters hosting AI.
The ones hosting AI are the problem. Eliminate those, and the ones hosting the internet are fine (although could still convert to greener practices like on-site solar and closed-loop/greywater cooling systems, etc.).
Eliminate the internet datacenters and the AI corps are still going to destroy the environment, you just won't have access to wikipedia or the fediverse.
yea no
you wanna ignore what is actual reality and play pretend go for it but i’m not interested in hearing about it
They were being nice, but since you insist on persisting in your willfull ignorance: you're a fucking idiot who does not understand how the internet works nor how data centers are involved with it. Your straw man argument that 70% of the internet are bots is sourced by your ass, from whence you pulled it.
zzzz moron
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/bot-web-traffic-overtaken-human-web-traffic-data-shows-rcna348522
and this is the sanitized take
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
crawl your ass out from under that rock
Wow, you really are braindead. No one here is arguing against there being an enormous amount of bot traffic. Learn to interpret what you read.
and yet when we’e not 5 replies deep your in the negatives, i think plenty of people get it even if you don’t
You're getting ratioed harder than me if you really wanna bring that up
because it’s the same 3 idiots this far down
Yeah, you you and you. You were in the negatives by your fourth comment down. Literally one of my comments has been downvoted by anyone besides you. You're encroaching upon the border of delusional.
Nah, you're the only idiot left on the chain here. Enjoy your prize, you're special.
I'm actually telling the facts and you're the one being detached from reality, but normally people like you are "not interested in hearing about it" anyway, so I'm honestly not surprised you say that.
I'm done arguing with you for the same reason I don't debate climate change deniers.
what facts?
there are literally multiple reports on how the majority of internet traffic is bots
what a strange hill to die on
I never said anything about the relative proportion if internet traffic that is or isn't bots. Does your only argument require a severe misrepresentation of what anyone else is saying?
The fact is that the datacenters that have been rapidly accelerating the demise of the planet and its climate over the last 5-6 years are specifically AI datacenters. Getting rid of those, completely frivolous and unnecessary as they are, will go a long way to reducing the severity human-induced climate change.
Getting rid of the datacenters that make the internet possible would be negligible compared to that. But I'm just restating what I've already said at this point, because you're apparently either a troll or incapable of reading and understanding. Maybe both.
Taking away the internet from the billions of humans who use it just because it's flooded with bot traffic is a really stupid idea, when you could instead get rid of the datacenters that make the bots possible. The vast majority of compute operating these bots is happening at the bot-side of the internet, not at the datacenters running the internet. The actual amount of energy/compute used for that web traffic to travel from client to server is tiny compared to what's consumed at the bot farms.
What you're proposing is more akin to tearing up the highways in order to prevent drug trafficking. It doesn't solve the problem you're pretending to want to address, it's just a red herring that makes things worse for everyone else.
no you just live in this make believe land from 5 years ago
You're the one living in make-believe land. You haven't even attempted to engage with a single thing I've said.
because you specifically are a waste of time
Mirror, mirror
They WERE 2 different things, not anymore.
No they are still two very different things.
data centers are built in the middle of nowhere
show me how this works without the internet
where are the training data sets coming from?
why are foss projects getting shit on?
why are small to mid websites choking on scrapers?
why is so much of our digital media complete slop?
so yea totally different and separable
Are you trying to suggest that foss projects, small websites, and digital media will somehow benefit from destroying the internet?
what is this hard on for destroying the internet?
get off your strawman
fucking waste of time
You're the one who's saying we should get rid of all the datacenters, not just AI. That includes the ones that enable the internet. You think that's not the same thing as destroying the internet?
Literally, it's what your first comment was about. It's not a strawman. This entire comment chain is about exactly that! People telling you it's a bad take, and you doubling down and being smug about being wrong.