Eco-Lizzie

Unless you’re living under a rock, you know what AI is, or at least have some general idea of what it is. Whether you want to cheat on a homework assignment that would take you an hour to complete, find out incorrect information, or generate a picture of a person with deformed hands, AI like ChatGPT has your back! What people don’t usually realize, however, is the large toll that this technology takes on the environment. According to the International Energy Agency, AI data centers currently use around 1% of global electricity. While this number seems low, keep in mind that most recent language models are only two years old, so this number is expected to skyrocket in coming years. AI usage is expected to increase to 19% of the global electricity usage. For reference, the entire continent of North America uses 16% of the global electricity, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That’s only three years from now, and if AI keeps growing at the exponential rate in which it’s currently growing, that number will also skyrocket.

Energy is not the only resource AI uses. Since the supercomputers used to power AI overheat so easily, air cooling systems require a massive amount of water to cool them down. Currently, according to the University of Illinois, there are around 11,000 large data centers in the US, and each one consumes around 132 gallons of water a day, which is equivalent to the amount of water consumed by 46 million people. The energy demand for AI is expected to soar as this technology gets increasingly better. In the next decade, the CEO of Dell computers says we may need over a hundred times more data centers than we have now. This increase in energy and water consumption could prove to be extremely unsustainable for the future.

Here’s what you can do to help:

• Instead of using ChatGPT to ask a simple question, just use Google. A Google search consumes significantly less energy than a ChatGPT query. Also, Google allows you to verify if information is trustworthy a lot easier than ChatGPT. Just make sure you scroll past the AI overview that comes up, because it’s apparently super necessary to have AI tell you information that you could have just taken 30 more seconds to find yourself.