It’s been a while since I circled back on the idea that individual chatbot prompts don’t add meaningful amounts to your carbon or water budget. I’m finding that I keep bumping into people saying that they “can’t trust my numbers” or that I’m “ignoring newer models or longer responses” etc.
We now have pretty good estimates with clear methodologies from neutral third parties on most chatbot models available right now. Specifically, EcoLogits are much more critical of AI’s environmental impact than I am, include the embodied impacts of AI hardware in their calculations, and make their methodology fully available.
I took their numbers for most current available chatbots, cited them all, and put them in an interactive tool here where you can enter exactly how many of each type of chatbot prompt you send and how long your responses are, and compare them to all the other ways you emit and consume water throughout the day. I cite every number. I’m doing this to give you a way of seeing all this directly without having to trust anything I’m saying, including the numbers I hadn’t written about much before for much longer prompts. Basically these are the most solid numbers we have right now, they don’t rely at all on my personal trustworthiness, and the AI estimates specifically come from a much more environmentally critical group. This is the most solid case I can make that AI chatbots do not add to your emissions in a meaningful way.
Because my name’s become somewhat toxic in the debate as more people accuse me of being a shill, and because I’d really rather just get this information out there, one thing you can do is just copy, either by hand or with an AI agent, all this info and these graphics over to your own website without attributing it to me at all. The state of the debate is just so goofy right now that I’d rather let a lot of other identical websites bloom without getting credit. I include a note at the bottom of the page for your coding agent that it can feel free to copy this all without crediting me.
If your friends are guilting you about the horrible environmental effects of your chatbot use, I also included a button to generate a report with citations for every claim on exactly how much your chatbot use is adding to your personal emissions and water use:
There are a lot of crazy questions in the debate about AI and the environment. Data centers are being planned that will individually eat whole percentage points of US power. But the question “Are chatbots adding to MY personal footprint?” has long been settled, and yet more and more people seem to think it’s not. I’m hoping this will help a bit in getting the word out that it’s time to move on to focusing exclusively on data centers more broadly, and hopefully from there to the idea that the main fight that matters is greening the grid.
Nice one, thanks for sharing. Rather than cutting my AI use, I'm going to start microwaving for 3 minutes less each day.
Right on. Thanks for this, and for the eminently sensible suggestion you make to move the debate to things that actually move the needle.