I’m sorry, did you think AI was free?

Today I’ve been doing some thinking, and reading random blog posts online. In the depths of my rabbit-hole exploration, I discovered the blog of Drew Devault, specifically the article on companies externalizing their costs on us - I highly recommend this read.

A lot of people have incorporated the use of “free” ai in their lives recently. AI isn’t free, and never will be. We’re all paying for it, whether it’s directly through a subscription, or indirectly because of the impact AI data centers are having on our communities and the world. Tried to buy RAM lately? Keep seeing your electricity bill go up? Well, AI is notoriously resource hungry. It needs copious amounts of RAM and electricity. RAM prices have more than tripled in the past year, and we’re not slowing down on building new AI data centers. It’s all adding up, and creating cost for EVERYONE, whether they use AI or not. In this post, I really only talk about the electricity usage. This doesn’t take into account the things like AI using your data for training, water usage, the environmental impact of data centers (especially the hyper scale AI data centers), the insane amount of load scraping the web for training is putting on websites, etc.

I’m not going to try and skew the facts. As of 2024, ALL data centers only use an estimated 2% of the worlds electricity supply, and even accounting for the AI rush, are only projected to scale up to around 10% by 2030. The adoption of EV’s, and the use of air conditioning are both higher consumers of electricity. (See iea.org) So it’s not like AI data centers are using an obscene never seen before amount of electricity. However, data centers are very power dense, and tend to dramatically increase the overall power usage in an area. A SINGLE rack in an AI data center can easily consume 80KW of electricity. For reference, my average KW usage at my house for a month, in the summer, including charging an EV twice a week, is 2KW. So ONE RACK can pull the equivalent power of 40 houses. ONE RACK. Datacenters typically have THOUSANDS of racks inside, so one data center could easily be the equivalent power usage of 50,000 homes or more, in a space that would maybe fit several hundred homes. The entire grid has to be updated to support that kind of localized power draw, and that’s not going to be cheap.

For an area to be considered “urban” according to the US Census Bureau, it must have at least 2000 households per square mile. So one data center could easily equal the power usage of 25 square miles of urban housing, but in a much smaller footprint. How are we going to update the infrastructure to support that much more power going through? How are we going to generate the extra power in the first place? Are we going to fall back to using fossil fuels, and destroy the environment more? Cover the ground in solar panels, and bake anything underneath? Where does it end? Is there a good solution?

I’m not saying AI shouldn’t exist. It can be very useful. I’m basically required to use it daily for my job. It’s very good at following patterns and doing the type of tedious tasks a human would spend hours on, but in a few mintues of time. Yes it uses a lot of power. So do cars, manufacturing equipment, assembly lines, etc. Should we reject anything new if it consumes a lot of power? I think in the end, we need to learn to be more responsible with AI. We don’t need to use it for everything. We really shouldn’t use it for everything. Do we really need to make fake videos? Do we need AI generated images? Or even edited images? Why do we want to cover up our lives, and pretend everything is fine? Pretend we look different, or have a different lifestyle than we do? Do we really need to get that perfect family photo, where everyone is looking straight at the camera and has their best smile? Is that natural? Do we need to keep pumping out vibe coded software full of bugs, supported by a one mind and a machine? What happens when the owner of the project loses interest? Or if they don’t keep up on security best practices? Don’t keep the app up to date? These are all problems we already have, but it used to require at least some amount of dedication to get a project up and going, or some amount of effort to create or edit images and video. Now we can do it on a whim, and need no commitment to keeping a project going. We’re basically creating an AI XML bomb, infinitely generating useless content that needs to be stored somewhere, more content that AI will be training itself on, consuming more power for training, and more power for generating, in an infinite cycle until all our resources are exhausted and nobody can afford to store text files anymore.

So anyways. Use AI responsibly. If you’re going to use AI, at least think about what effects the content you’re generating will have on the people around you. Don’t put artists out of a job. Or overwhelm websites with spam requests from your new AI web crawler bot. At least only target meta and google if you’re doing it ;)

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