The Perils of Digital Discourse
Can we talk about digital art without commerce?
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The Water Cost of Big Tech
Technology can be thirsty. Some tech more than others.
<h3 dir="ltr">As global warming continues to make summers unbearable, and New York City’s climate has recently been re-designated as "subtropical," the environmental impact of AI and the blockchain have once again become topics of discussion.</h3> <p dir="ltr">According to Alex de Vries, founder of the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, in 2021 the CO2 emissions of Bitcoin was 65,4 million tonnes, roughly the equivalent of a mid-sized European country. What wasn’t addressed as much in mainstream news was the water cost, which was 1.57 billion litres, which amounts to nearly 700 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Today, that number is 2.3 billion litres, and the total water consumption of cryptocurrencies that require proof-of-work, i.e. more computing, is 3.7 billion litres. Proof-of-stake chains like Ethereum are fundamentally less thirsty, but a single Bitcoin-based transaction consumes around 16,000 to 22,000 litres of water.</p> <p dir="ltr">In comparison, AI data centres around the world are consuming an estimated 560 billion litres of water per year, which is equivalent to roughly half the amount of water in Lake Annecy in France (so many, many more pools).While it is safe to say that compared to cryptocurrency, AI is the leading consumer of water, when it comes to individual transactions or processes, such as a single NFT sale versus a ChatGPT query, things are slightly different. </p> <p dir="ltr"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/taex-storage-prod/news/upload-1274305311.jpg" alt="Lake Annecy, golibo//Getty Images" width="1497" height="991"><br><span class="custom-span">Lake Annecy, Image: golibo, Getty Images</span></p> <p dir="ltr">A single AI query on ChatGPT consumes between 0,32 and 25 millilitres. Granted, we often use AI for an entire conversation, rather than a single question, but even if we were to multiply that number by 10, or 100, we would still be several orders of magnitude below the water consumption of blockchain transactions. You could think of it as a shot glass of water versus a swimming pool.</p> <p dir="ltr">This is a crucial difference, because it changes consumer culpability. A single person engaging in speculative trading for a week on the blockchain, will in all likelihood consume more water than one person having a philosophical debate with ChatGPT over the course of an entire year.</p> <p dir="ltr">And yet, we do not hold individual crypto traders and NFT holders in our lives nearly as accountable for their environmental impact as we do those who engage in/with AI.</p> <p dir="ltr">A surprisingly high number of people continue to flood my DMs with mentions of how much water is consumed every time someone makes a query with ChatGPT. As an artist working with AI, it has become one of the first criticisms people launch at me, even before they see the work. I certainly do not dismiss that AI, especially on a corporate level, can be a thirsty beast.</p> <p dir="ltr">But the art world has been a big water consumer for a long, long time. </p> <p dir="ltr">From collectors flying on private jets, to the cost of shipping artworks across continents; from the environmental impact of sourcing materials for producing sculptures, producing paint, developing film photographs etc., to erecting temporary exhibition spaces, there are many elements of the art world that require large quantities of water. The Venice Biennale might have achieved carbon neutrality in 2022, but CO2 emissions and water consumption are entirely different things. Still, lowering CO2 emissions includes managing logistics to be more efficient, which means it is reasonable to assume a positive impact on water consumption. But, even if an institution is environmentally-conscious, art world patrons are often luxury travelers with big environmental footprints.</p> <p dir="ltr">A private mid-sized jet flight consumes roughly 800 gallons of water for a two-hour flight, and there are nearly 10,000 private flights taken every day. Annually, this adds up to 15.3 billion litres. According to The Guardian, around 250,000 people fly private every year, and most are repeat fliers. This means that the average annual water cost per private jet user is about 61,200 litres. Broken down per flight, the water cost is roughly 4,286 litres.</p> <p dir="ltr">For example, in 2023, Kim Kardashian consumed approximately 707,000 litres across her 165 private flights as reported by Ashley Pomplas of The Post Athens, making her the single global leader in individual water consumption. To reach her level of water consumption, an individual would have to make 37 NFT transactions, or generate 55,9 million individual queries on ChatGPT, which, even at 1 query per second, is physically impossible. In other words, if you release an NFT collection with 40 artworks and you sell out, you have just spent as much water as a celebrity flying on a private jet nearly every other day.</p> <p dir="ltr">So now at least, we have a fascinating exchange rate for what our individual actions cost in terms of water.</p> <p dir="ltr">Of course, this is not a perfect comparison. In fact, there are countless other industries whose water consumption could be included in this article. But, in the messy, messy Venn diagram of art, technology, and luxury, private flights consume significantly more water than public AI tools like ChatGPT on an individual level.</p> <p dir="ltr">Now, when we zoom out, global data centers do consume significantly more water, around 4-6 trillion litres to be exact. This easily exceeds global aviation, at 40-60 billion litres. I am simply emphasising that hating on OpenAI and holding your friends accountable for global warming would have less impact than asking Kim Kardashian to fly commercial for a year.</p> <p dir="ltr">As the anti-AI sentiment continues to surge through social media, and people seek new scapegoats to blame for the excruciating heat waves passing through the Northern hemisphere, it is vital that we take a moment to ensure our outrage is not purely reactionary and ill-researched.</p> <p dir="ltr"><em>Important note: Most of the math in this article is very, very rough. I am not a statistician and I barely survived high school trigonometry, but the numbers are publicly available for anyone interested. I am more interested in fairness, accountability, and strongly welcome (even encourage) everyone to do their own research before hating on AI.</em></p> <p> </p>
The Attention Trap
On the dangers of trading in online traffic & celebrity
<p dir="ltr">During 2022, I interviewed the founders of several digital art platforms that were focusing on growing NFT culture and essentially recruiting artists to become crypto-artists. One such founder, whom I won’t name, said that their company’s curatorial approach hinged primarily on the artist having a large following on Instagram. This was, after all, a practical method that ensured investing time and money into artists posed less of a risk, since they came with a pre-built audience. This audience-centric, or perhaps audience-aware approach, is commonplace in the digital art space. A large digital following doesn’t just offer street cred, it implies commercial viability. It implies immediate market feedback. What it doesn’t guarantee is artistic and cultural value.</p> <blockquote> <p dir="ltr">We are all participants of, and complicit in, the attention economy.</p> </blockquote> <p>For millennia, artists were protected from an immediate, opinionated audience. As a result, their practice wasn’t subject to the daily commentary and validation–or rejection–of the masses. A solo exhibition, usually years apart, was a rare opportunity for an artist to receive critical and public feedback (and, hopefully, to sell). These prolonged periods between shows, between moments of visibility, meant the stakes were significantly higher, but they also granted the artist a greater degree of independence from the market and from public opinion, to create independently. </p> <p dir="ltr">As artists on social media, we no longer have that luxury.</p> <p dir="ltr">We are all participants of, and complicit in, the attention economy. The impact of this cultural shift has been tremendously destructive for contemporary art. Social media rewards consistency and persistence. These are valuable traits, sure, but they also punish creative risk taking. For example, an artist exploring something that is not strictly in line with their past work will usually be punished, in terms of audience engagement and visibility.</p> <p dir="ltr">I should be clear that when I say punish, I don’t mean in the vindictive, disciplinarian sense. I mean that you are simply shifted lower down in the timelines you would have been featured in. Social media algorithms also often favor commercial realities, meaning figurative works are rewarded over abstract ones, the use of warmer colours, such as red, might be rewarded (with attention) over the use of the colour blue, etc.</p> <p dir="ltr">Most social media platforms are not benevolent mechanisms that seek to promote art: their task is to promote whatever content keeps you on the platform, scrolling endlessly. So if an artist posts a work that might disrupt that flow, such as an artwork that diverges from their oeuvre, do you think they might be promoted as diligently? Because based on personal experience, I can tell you that the view and like counts of my artworks that are consistent with my past work, versus experimental posts, is staggering. And it’s not a question of the audience refusing the experiments, because these systems decide for them whether it is worth their attention.<strong> </strong></p> <p dir="ltr">Another detrimental element of social media is the visibility of an artist’s following, which has an impact on their market viability. It would be reasonable to assume that today, some commercial galleries, much like NFT marketplaces, are aware of an artist’s pre-built audience on social media when considering them for a show or for representation.</p> <p dir="ltr">And while this enhanced, constant form of visibility may benefit some artists, to be discovered or to sustain their lives through a more continuous sales cycle, it does affect the creative cycle.</p> <p dir="ltr">TLDR: Measuring an artist’s cultural value by their social media footprint is a deeply problematic method for choosing the champions for digital art, because those engagements are fundamentally indicators of mass public appeal, not artistic prowess or creativity.</p> <h3 dir="ltr">E-Commercial Realities</h3> <p dir="ltr">Another dangerous trend that I am observing within the digital landscape recently came in the form of a DM from a fellow artist several weeks ago. Referring to one of my previous Cache columns, this artist had provided a link to a site that demonstrated his NFT sale performance over the last few years. It was not a flex or a pitch, it was simply his preferred method for presenting himself as an artist.</p> <p>I recoiled, because for a traditional artist to directly submit this kind of information to anyone at all is anathema. The art world, whether you agree with it or not, does not want artists to be too involved in their own commercial reality. For any traditional artist to publicise their sales performance data let alone send it to people so directly is… unthinkable.</p> <p>The digital art market, in its quest for transparency, does the polar opposite, and plenty of digital artists openly share their market cap and past sales numbers of their works. While this may help combat speculative pricing and demonstrate investability, it does create an unhealthy environment in which nascent digital artists begin to equate their commercial success with artistic success. Sometimes, especially in the absence of critical discourse, this may be the only metric they have access to. But not all metrics are designed to be shared, let alone considered by the artists themselves when producing work. This can, and sometimes does, lead to artists allowing the numbers to determine the nature of their practice, because they instinctively pursue series that reward them financially and on social media. Naturally traditional galleries also pressure their artists to make more of particular series that sell, but within a digital landscape, the mass production element becomes corrosive much more quickly.</p> <p>There is no quick and dirty solution to this problem, but it does need to be talked about. Online celebrity, market impact, or the ability to make the algorithms favour you, should not be the arbiters of the next great digital artist. When we confuse digital fame and commercial success with cultural value, we can lose sight of art we should cultivate, and preserve.</p> <p> </p>
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