Is it really worth the costs?
"Let’s say you’re running a marathon as a charity runner and organizing a fundraiser to support your cause. You ask an AI model 15 questions about the best way to fundraise."
"Then you make 10 attempts at an image for your flyer before you get one you are happy with, and three attempts at a five-second video to post on Instagram."
"You’d use about 2.9 kilowatt-hours of electricity—enough to ride over 100 miles on an e-bike (or around 10 miles in the average electric vehicle) or run the microwave for over three and a half hours."
"One can do some very rough math to estimate the energy impact. In February the AI research firm Epoch AI published an estimate of how much energy is used for a single ChatGPT query..."
"One billion of these every day for a year would mean over 109 gigawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power 10,400 US homes for a year. If we add images and imagine that generating each one requires as much energy as it does with our high-quality image models, it’d mean an additional 35 gigawatt-hours, enough to power another 3,300 homes for a year. This is on top of the energy demands of OpenAI’s other products, like video generators, and that for all the other AI companies and startups."
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/