Earlier in January, a new viral trend captured social media users’ interest. When Egyptians opened ChatGPT earlier this year and typed some version of “create a caricature of me based on everything you know about me,” few considered that such a trivial request carried an environmental cost. Every artificial intelligence (AI) generated cartoonish self-portraits shared and circulated on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, relies on energy-intensive servers, high electricity and water consumption, and a hidden toll most users have not heard of. The hidden plumbing behind every prompt The servers that power Large Language Models (LLMS) and tools such as ChatGPT generate enormous amounts of heat as processors run strenuous operations. To keep them from overheating, data centers rely on water-based cooling systems. Said systems are vast industrial operations that consume significant volumes of freshwater. According to a paper published in April 2023 by the University of California, each 100-word AI prompt is estimated to use roughly 519 milliliters, almost one small bottle of water. Far more computationally intensive than text, image generation pushes that figure significantly higher. Depending on the model and data center, a single…
