It doesn’t come as much of a surprise to learn that, environmentally speaking, AI is an extremely wasteful and destructive technology. It’s rare that you can nail down the ecological cost of an image.
Still, researchers have assessed that generating a single AI image requires the same amount of energy needed to fully charge your iPhone battery. Training an AI model also requires “626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of around 300 round-trip flights between New York and San Francisco—nearly five times the lifetime emissions of the average car.” This technology, marketed as artificial intelligence, also consumes millions of gallons of clean water, which would otherwise be utilized as regular old drinking water. One report found that, in a few years, it will demand the equivalent of half of the water the UK uses annually. AI’s demand for perpetual access to consistent, maximum energy makes using renewables like wind or solar unpopular among tech companies, as the power supply depends on weather factors. So, nearly all of the data centers fueling AI operate on fossil fuels—methane and coal. On top of that, the breakthrough technology uses and dispenses harmful chemicals like lead, mercury, and cadmium (which have been tied to soil, air, and water contamination).
Some consider this sort of ecocidal engineering to be “scary but exciting,” and we should be “grateful” for such technologies. I expect that for most people who live on Earth, these observed and documented facts are pretty much enough to regard proprietary AI technologies as a net negative for you, me, society, and certainly for the planet.
