I speak loudly and often on my distaste for generative A.I. I think it’s a colossal waste of time, money, and resources that is, at its best, an absurdly incompetent secretary. It’s enabling wide-scale theft of creative property, largely at the expense of independent artists and graphic designers. It has already contributed to multiple suicides and actively encourages dangerous fantasies through unregulated feedback loops. I believe dependence on it is at best evidence of extreme ignorance, and according to a recent study from MIT, it also results in lower neural connectivity—i.e., it’s making people worse at pretty much everything. But if all that can’t convince you to drop it, then I am begging you to consider at least putting it on the shelf until the environmental impact is adequately addressed.

A.I. requires massive data centers, and those data centers take in astronomical amounts of electricity and fresh water to run and cool the servers. According to a recent article from the Washington Post in collaboration with the University of California, Riverside, writing a 100-word email using ChatGPT is equivalent to dumping out a little over 500 milliliters—or, about a bottle’s worth—of water; although this can vary from center to center, as in areas where electricity is cheaper than water, they often opt for electrical cooling systems.

These electrical cooling systems—alongside the electrical costs of actually running the servers—overwhelmingly depend on fossil fuels for power generation, with companies often citing the reliability of fossil fuel generation as the reason. Regardless of the excuses provided, these data centers are driving the expansion of fossil fuel projects during a time when we desperately need to eliminate them altogether. In 2024, experts predicted that the U.S.’s energy demands would grow by 16% in the following five years, thanks in part to massive power sink of A.I., and to meet this demand, companies such as Exxon Mobil are building new natural gas power plants for the express purpose of supplying electricity to data centers. 

This is absolutely deranged. We, as a planet, cannot afford this. Climate change is already severely impacting our environment, our weather, our crop production—you name it. If we want to avoid actual societal collapse, we need to be closing down fossil fuel plants, not building new ones.

The water costs only rub salt in the wound. According to a report from the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates, the vast majority of the water used for cooling is potable, fresh water—something that is in increasingly short supply. Fresh water is already only 3% of the world’s water, with only about a third of that being accessible. Droughts are only worsening as the climate crisis grows, and data centers are sucking up hundreds upon thousands of gallons of water daily that could be going to the communities their emissions are harming. Not only that, but this wonton consumption of water shows no signs of slowing down. In 2023, Google consumed over 8 billion gallons of water, with 87-89% of that going towards data centers. They show no signs of slowing down.

It’s also important to consider that these data centers are being constructed with little thought or care as to how they’ll impact the communities around them. Data centers built in the southwest put enormous strain on already struggling infrastructure with few penalties. For example, during droughts in Texas, residents faced harsh restrictions on water usage while data centers continued guzzling billions of gallons without regulation. Another instance of this carelessness comes from Elon Musk’s xAI data center, which was built in a historically Black neighborhood in Memphis, where its gas-burning generators are only worsening air pollution in an act of environmental racism that has been called out by numerous individuals, including SZA. (That’s right, if you keep using A.I., SZA will be disappointed in you.) These things are being built with no consideration towards the human cost their existence imposes, and that cost will only grow as time goes on.

A.I. does not care about people, because the companies who created it venerate one thing and one thing only—the bottom line. They are moving fast, they are breaking things, and they do not care about the people they break along the way. Now more than ever, we need to call for regulations to be imposed on A.I—for the sake of the work it steals, the power it draws, the water it guzzles, and the planet it is helping destroy.