The ethical dilemma of using AI


Mega user: AI uses evaporative cooling to run its systems in data centres, leading to billions of litres of clean water consumption. — 123rf

“DRAFT an e-mail to Xyz organisation for collaboration.” In this day and age, we ask AI-powered chatbots to do everything from mundane tasks to vibe coding (coding using artificial intelligence tools). But did you know that every time we ask an AI a question, it uses about 50ml of water to cool the supercompu­ters it resides in, and 10 times the energy of a standard Google search?

In 2023, approximately 863 billion litres of water were used by AI data centres – that’s about 305,000 Olympic swimming pools worth of water – and that value is expected to double in 2028.

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