The Environmental Cost of AI: Balancing Innovation with Sustainability

ChatGPT isn't great for the planet. Here's how to use AI responsibly.

AI is straining power grids and producing harmful emissions. But being thoughtful about when and how you use chatbots can help. If you care about the environment, it can be hard to tell how you should feel about using AI models such as ChatGPT in your everyday life. The carbon cost of asking an AI model a single text question can be measured in grams of CO2 -- which is something like 0.0000001 percent of an average American's annual carbon footprint. A query or two or 1,000 won't make a huge dent over the course of a year. But those little costs start to add up when you multiply them across 1 billion people peppering AI models with requests for text, photos and video. The data centers that host these models can devour more electricity than entire cities. Predictions about their rapid growth have pushed power companies to extend the lives of coal plants and build new natural gas plants. Keeping those computers cool uses freshwater -- about one bottle's worth for every 100 words of text ChatGPT generates. That doesn't mean you have to shun the technology entirely, according to computer scientists who study AI's energy consumption. But you can be thoughtful about when and how you use AI chatbots. "Use AI when it makes sense to use it. Don't use AI for everything," said Gudrun Socher, a computer science professor at Munich University of Applied Sciences. For basic tasks, you may not need AI -- and when you do use it, you can choose to use smaller, more energy-efficient models. When should I use AI? For simple questions -- such as finding a store's hours or looking up a basic fact -- you're better off using a search engine or going directly to a trusted website than asking an AI model, Socher said. A Google search takes about 10 times less energy than a ChatGPT query, according to a 2024 analysis from Goldman Sachs -- although that may change as Google makes AI responses a bigger part of search. For now, a determined user can avoid prompting Google's default AI-generated summaries by switching over to the "Web" search tab, which is one of the options alongside images and news. Adding "-ai" to the end of a search query also seems to work. Other search engines, including DuckDuckGo, give you the option to turn off AI summaries. If you have a thornier problem, especially one that involves summarizing, revising or translating text, then it's worth using an AI chatbot, Socher said. For some tasks, using AI might actually generate less CO2 than doing it yourself, according to Bill Tomlinson, a professor of informatics at the University of California at Irvine. "The real question isn't: Does [AI] have impact or not? Yes, it clearly does," Tomlinson said. "The question is: What would you do instead? What are you replacing?" An AI model can spit out a page of text or an image in seconds, while typing or digitally illustrating your own version might take an hour on your laptop. In that time, a laptop and a human worker will cause more CO2 pollution than an AI prompt, according to a paper Tomlinson co-authored last year. Tomlinson acknowledged there are many other reasons you might not choose to let AI write or illustrate something for you -- including worries about accuracy, quality, plagiarism and so on -- but he argued it could lower emissions if you use it to save labor and laptop time. Which AI model should I use? Not all AI models are equal: You can choose between bigger models that use more computing power to tackle complicated questions or small ones designed to give shorter, quicker answers using less power. ChatGPT, for instance, allows paying users to toggle between its default GPT-4o model, the bigger and more powerful GPT-4.5 model, and the smaller o4-mini model. Socher said the mini is good enough for most situations. But there's something of a trade-off between size, energy use and accuracy, according to Socher, who tested the performance of 14 AI language models from Meta, Alibaba, DeepSeek and a Silicon Valley start-up called Deep Cogito in a paper published Thursday. (Socher and her co-author, Maximilian Dauner, couldn't test popular models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini because those companies don't share their code publicly.) Socher and Dauner asked the AI models 500 multiple-choice and 500 free-response questions on high school math, world history, international law, philosophy and abstract algebra. Bigger models gave more accurate answers but used several times more energy than smaller models. If you have a request for an AI chatbot that involves grappling with complicated or theoretical concepts -- such as philosophy or abstract algebra -- it's worth the energy cost to use a bigger model, Socher said. But for simpler tasks, such as reviewing a high school math assignment, a smaller model might get the job done with less energy. No matter what model you use, you can save energy by asking the AI to be concise when you don't need long answers -- and keeping your own questions short and to the point. Models use more energy for every extra word they process. "People often mistake these things as having some sort of sentience," said Vijay Gadepally, a senior scientist at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory who studies ways to make AI more sustainable. "You don't need to say 'please' and 'thank you.' It's okay. They don't mind." What about 'passive' AI queries? Using AI doesn't just mean going to a chatbot and typing in a question. You're also using AI every time an algorithm organizes your social media feed, recommends a song or filters your spam email. "We may not even realize it ... because a lot of this is just hidden from us," Gadepally said. If you're not a ChatGPT power user, these behind-the-scenes algorithms probably represent the bulk of your AI usage -- and there's not much you can do about it other than using the internet less. It's up to the companies that are integrating AI into every aspect of our digital lives to find ways to do it with less energy and damage to the planet.

The Climate Impact of Different AI Prompts

Whether it be writing an email or planning a vacation, about a quarter of Americans say they interact with artificial intelligence several times a day, while another 28% say their use is about once a day. But many people might be unaware of the environmental impact of their searches. A request made using ChatGPT, for example, consumes 10 times the electricity of a Google search, according to the International Energy Agency. In addition, data centers, which are essential for powering AI models, represented 4.4% of all the electricity consumed in the U.S. in 2023 -- and by 2028 they're expected to consume approximately 6.7 to 12% of the country's electricity. It's likely only going to increase from there: The number of data centers worldwide have risen from 500,000 in 2012 to over 8 million as of September 2024.