THENATIONALPULSE (The National Pulse) - Your Jeans Are Thirstier Than Your Chatbot.
The water-usage argument against artificial intelligence has become the climate left’s favorite scold. The pitch runs as follows: every time you ask ChatGPT a question, somewhere a data centre guzzles a bottle of water to keep itself cool, and the planet pays the price. Stop using AI, the lecture concludes, or you are complicit in […]
The water-usage argument against artificial intelligence has become the climate left’s favorite scold. The pitch runs as follows: every time you ask ChatGPT a question, somewhere a data centre guzzles a bottle of water to keep itself cool, and the planet pays the price. Stop using AI, the lecture concludes, or you are complicit in environmental ruin. The numbers, however, tell a different story (if anybody bothered to check them). A single pair of cotton jeans takes roughly 1,800 gallons of water to manufacture, the equivalent of somewhere between 136,000 and 681,000 ChatGPT queries, depending on what you’re asking. A single almond, the smug snack of the wellness influencer class, requires a full gallon of water to produce, and…Open