Whether people would switch off meat on their own is a separate issue. If water became scarce enough to start moving the price, then you'd absolutely see people eat less meat.
But their point does disarm the suggestion that water consumption for AI is bad because it's just for fun while meat feeds people.
Because when you eat meat, you could have eaten something far less resource intensive like tempeh. But you ate meat for reasons beyond survival. For most of us, it's because we like the taste and we're used to it.
I don't see that as having any stronger of a claim to water consumption than the things we use AI for (fun, getting work done, writing nix/k8s config) much less a claim to many times the amount of water consumption than AI data centers.
But their point does disarm the suggestion that water consumption for AI is bad because it's just for fun while meat feeds people.
Because when you eat meat, you could have eaten something far less resource intensive like tempeh. But you ate meat for reasons beyond survival. For most of us, it's because we like the taste and we're used to it.
I don't see that as having any stronger of a claim to water consumption than the things we use AI for (fun, getting work done, writing nix/k8s config) much less a claim to many times the amount of water consumption than AI data centers.