Before I conducted any research, I thought the biggest ethical issues around AI were things like bias or misinformation. I had very little idea of the massive water crisis spawned from the AI boom.

In the MIT’s article’s breakdown of generative AI’s environmental impact, A single ChatGPT query consumes about five times more electricity than if you searched the same thing on Google (Zewe). That’s not even the biggest piece however, the actual training of the AI systems consumes an absurd amount of resources. The article states that training a model like OpenAI’s GPT-3 consumed roughly 1,287 megawatt hours of electricity (Zewe). It’s important to note that these numbers are just the training phase and the energy demands keep piling up every time anyone uses the model. It’s not even just electricity, water use was already a big problem that has only been made worse by the AI industry. For every kilowatt hour of energy a data center consumes, it needs around two liters of water for cooling (Zewe) and these facilities are pulling from real municipal water supplies and affecting local ecosystems.

Going forward, I’m going to be more intentional about when and how I use AI tools. Not every question needs a ChatGPT prompt sometimes a search engine or my own brain is perfectly fine.

Works Cited

Zewe, Adam. “Explained: Generative AI’s Environmental Impact.” MIT News, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 17 Jan. 2025, https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117