When you make a picture on your mobile phone, and show someone something from the fantasy world with AI for fun, do you realize how much energy is being consumed on the other end? The artificial intelligence AI that is changing today's world costs us not only money or time, but also electricity, water and nature. The problem is that many of us do not know, do not understand how much burden this amazing technology is putting on the back of the earth. Suppose, you ran an AI filter on TikTok. You did it for fun. But to run that filter, the video went to a server thousands of miles away. There, the AI process was run and the new version returned.
While enjoying these few seconds of fun, you did not even know that a few liters of water may have turned into steam on that server and evaporated. When an AI picture is made, it may be finished with one click. But behind that click, a huge data center thousands of kilometers away works, where thousands of processors hum every second, whose job is to understand your command and create this huge planned world. It takes gigawatts of electricity to run this massive computing process. And it takes a lot of water to generate that electricity and keep the servers cool.
You might be surprised to learn that a large model like ChatGPT uses an average of about 1,287 megawatts of electricity per hour, which could power 40,000 households for a day. And Google's data centers use about 2.1 million liters of water a day for cooling. That's the equivalent of about 4,200 people drinking water a day.
Seventy-five percent of the world's water is drinkable, but very little of it is drinkable. Most of that is locked up in ice. Simply put, only 0.5 percent of the world's total water is available for our use. Meanwhile, about 720 million people currently live in places where there is an extreme water shortage. The inexorable spread of AI technology is exacerbating that water shortage.
On social media, AI is being used to create funny videos using the faces of famous people. Someone is being faked to cry or laugh. Even dead people are being shown as alive. Some people are using Midjourney or Dall-E to create fifty to sixty pictures every day just for fun. Sometimes they are making cat samurai, sometimes they are making digital Eid clothes and posting them on social media.
Scientists fear that if this continues at this pace, AI could become one of the world's largest carbon and water-emitting technologies by 2030. Water use through AI could exceed 6.6 billion cubic meters per year by 2027, which is four to six times the annual water use of a country like Denmark. So whether we should completely eliminate AI remains to be seen.
