Artificial intelligence platforms have taken the world by storm. AI — referring to any technology that can process information and superficially mimic human thinking — has been around since the 1950s. However, in recent years, AI has evolved to be a smarter, faster and more accessible tool. In particular, its rising use in academic spaces and higher education, including at NYU, has brought up numerous ethical concerns about plagiarism, but AI’s drastic environmental implications are often ignored.
AI platforms like ChatGPT pose a triple threat to the environment — they produce a huge carbon footprint, use mass amounts of water and consume great amounts of energy. In order to present users with human-like answers, AI search engines filter through vast amounts of data to identify patterns and make decisions. This process requires a great amount of electricity — a daily use of 17,000 times more energy than the average United States household uses per day. Compared to one Google search, a single request made through ChatGPT consumes 10 times more electricity.
Currently, meeting this energy demand can only be accomplished by housing AI in vast, densely packed servers that generate lots of heat and need cooling to operate successfully. The warehouses’ cooling towers use significant amounts of water to produce cool air, which then circulates the heat out of the generators and brings the temperature of the server down. Researchers have found that each string of five to 50 prompts typed into ChatGPT uses roughly 16 ounces of water, which is equivalent to dumping out an entire bottle of water. From 2021 to 2022, Microsoft’s water consumption rose by 34%, and Google’s rose by nearly 20%, following both companies integrating AI into their programs.
This excessive use of water is concerning, especially because freshwater is a scarce resource, making up only 2.5% of all water on Earth — most of which is inaccessible to humans because it is in glaciers or the ground. As a result, 4.4 billion people across 135 middle to low-income countries lack access to safe drinking water, and in the next year two-thirds of the global population could face water shortages.
With AI embedding itself in everything, from speeding up daily tasks to being incorporated into academic and work spaces, its environmental cost continues to grow. AI-related infrastructure is set to consume more than six times as much water as Denmark in the coming years. In addition, training a single large AI model can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, which is roughly five times the lifetime emissions of an average car. As the temperature on Earth continues to climb due to global warming, future generations face a growing number of climate-related problems, such as displacement, drought and pollution — all from water scarcity and carbon emissions.
Despite Gen Z being the most environmentally conscious generation, we tend to ignore the environmental effects of services that convenience us. A recent survey showed that 70% of Gen Z respondents use generative AI regularly. By comparison, 68% of respondents that do not use AI were Gen X or baby boomers — 40% of the non-users reported unfamiliarity with the technology altogether. Our generation, unfortunately, is the driving force behind AI’s negative effect on our Earth.
This is not to say that students should cease the use of AI completely. AI is here to stay — in fact, it is predicted that 90% of companies will have adopted it by next year. Therefore, knowing how to use it may be a valuable — if not necessary — skill to bring to the job market post-graduation. However, it is important to be mindful when using AI for frivolous purposes. Whether you are asking questions just for fun, doing basic math calculations that can easily be solved with a regular calculator or using it to speed up tasks like making shopping lists, the environmental detriment of AI is far too great to treat it as lightly as we have.
WSN’s Opinion section strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion section are solely the views of the writer.
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