TL;DR
You’re a busy person, so the meat of it is – I used AI for boilerplate verbiage on my store before I knew the costs. Outside of that I don’t use AI.
Boy does it have costs, you should be aware of the ecological impact and vote!
Intro
AI is a problem on a variety of levels. I’m not going to say it doesn’t have its very valid uses or that it can eventually be used for good. However, with the lack of regulation and a surge in demand across the tech world, it’s leading to an ecological disaster.
Water Consumption
Currently data centers are using unprecedented amounts of fresh water to cool their servers. A mid sized data center consumes 300,000 gallons of water, a day, according to Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory. Many data centers are already relying on watersheds that are already strained because of drought. The amount of waste water these centers create are also overwhelming existing infrastructure that weren’t prepared for the vast amounts moving through these data centers. On top of the water usage to make CPUs and GPUs – a single chip that ends up in these servers has already consumed thousands of water just being made before they even get to these data centers.
The demand for GPUs and RAM has also gone through the roof making hardware component prices soar. The impact on other industries will start to be felt in 2026 in a harsh way, making everything from agriculture to healthcare increase in costs – mark my words.
Theoretically there’s some pushback at the strain on local communities. Considering some cities that house many data centers are already relying on potable water instead of reclaimed water means this water shortage impact is going to be exponential and spread like webs. The US government has been neutered in its ability to do pretty much anything that isn’t lobbying for or creating policy purely for the ultra wealthy, so I’m personally not holding my breath for reasonable regulation any time soon.
Energy Consumption
Anecdotally, I’m seeing a privatized push for green energy sources which does give me some hope for the future. The only real power individual consumers have is with our wallets and so every household or business that can cut the cord to the grid is a win. The problem is that these data centers have come in and replaced that energy consumption gap in a terrifying way. By 2030 it’s estimated that data centers could account for 20% of global energy consumption.
From 2005 to 2017 the energy consumption of data centers actually flattened despite centers steadily increasing in size and numbers because of efforts in efficiency. AI demands have destroyed any pretense at sustainable growth and latest reports show that 4.4% of US energy is going towards AI. This means eventually AI will turn to dirty energy to fill in the demands that clean energy will eventually be unable to provide.
Trump and OpenAI plan to spend $500 billion on the Stargate Initiative to build 10 data centers which each would consume more power than the entire state of New Hampshire. It’s also probably why a moratorium was briefly put into “The Big Beautiful Bill” on AI regulation for 10 years. Apple also plans to spend $500 billion on manufacturing and data centers over the next 4 years. Google initially planned on $75 billion at the beginning of the year for 2025 alone, but ended up in over $90 billion with $4.75 billion spent on a single data center in December. How can consumers possibly combat this?
Ethical Concerns
Yes, stealing art is at the bottom of my priority list. If this were the biggest concern of AI for society and our world, I think I could frankly chalk it up to a philosophical debate. To be clear: I am wholly against AI models being trained on works where the artists did not consent to their art being used. I don’t honestly think it’s that muddied of a topic either – if you can spend billions on data centers you can also pay artists. The amount of AI slop out there in just a few short years is staggering and it’s only going to get worse. To be fair, each new medium/tool creates a good amount of rubbish upon launch. Objectively, I’d like to believe based on examples from the past that AI slop too will eventually decline as companies realize they can’t just replace people. There’s more than enough evidence; from court cases to medical advice where AI hasn’t just led people astray, but has been directly dangerous. One of the biggest problems with AI currently is that it won’t say anything akin to “I’m not trained well enough on that” or far more simply, “I don’t know”. It will always give an answer meaning as of right now, it cannot be trusted.
AI is Here to Stay
So, we’re spending global resources and vast amounts of wealth on AI. It produces a lot of garbage, can’t be trusted, and corporations/businesses erroneously believe they can replace people/experts. Is there anything good about it?
What it can do will eventually be irreplaceable. Like most things machines can do for humanity is in its ability to take man hours that account for years or decades and boil it down into days – if not minutes. The human genome is 3.2 billion base pairs long so going through a single person’s genome with mere man power would be unreasonable. With medical technology such as CRISPR, finding problems and fixing it with machine aid alone has already created new therapies with promising results. Gene editing with CAR-T cells has cured another child’s leukaemia. A disease previously considered incurable.
As a tool, AI can help us as we stand on the threshold of a medical revolution. More precise patient dosing, diagnosis, with access to family history, can aid healthcare workers who are overburdened and short on time. Identifying problems in infrastructure or code, suggesting out of the box solutions, there’s a myriad of ways in which it can benefit us. I look forward to those innovations, I have to be hopeful, because it’s not going away.
What’s the Point?
We all need to use it responsibly. I know it can feel like a slap in the face to say don’t use it unless you actually need it when we’re going to all collectively watch corporations not give a damn. Personal responsibility should still count for something, right? Which means we vote in people who also care about personal responsibility and regulation. Which means, WE NEED TO VOTE. Especially in local elections. Your local leaders are going to care about the strain on the water and energy supply long before the federal government does. Demand leaders who will ask if a data center actually benefits your community and pushes back on what that data center will do for you.
Encourage people you know to limit their use of AI, be aware of the changing shape of the industry and its costs, but ultimately be educated on the topic.
Transparency and Pledge
Before I was aware of the nature of AI’s ecological costs, I did use it to create boilerplate verbiage for my online store. Out of all of the uses of AI, it’s not terrible, but it also did happen. As far as my artistic works are considered, I will go out of my way to not use AI. I can’t guarantee at this point that I won’t accidentally use AI reference. At the moment, AI slop feels like a cancer that’s growing into every corner of the internet, but if there’s even a hint of a whiff of AI I will find something else.
As far as my work is concerned – AI free. I create my own geometry with my 3D models, I print them, I paint them, I photograph them, I edit the photographs and I spend way too much time doing it all. My hand drawn art is also me blundering through by hand. I will endeavor to not use AI or at least be aware of technologies (tools) that I will use that may use it.
I hope you do too.