In my Ethics in AI class we talk a lot about big stuff, like whether AI should help decide who gets hired. But I use AI pretty much every day for homework and coding, and I realized I had no clue what one question actually costs. So I looked it up.
The energy part
Short answer: not that much. Google says a typical Gemini prompt uses about 0.24 watt-hours (source). Sam Altman says an average ChatGPT question is about 0.34 Wh, roughly an oven running for one second (source). My rough math says one phone charge is worth around 60 chatbot answers.
But it really depends on what you ask for. MIT Technology Review found that one 5-second AI video uses about as much energy as running a microwave for over an hour (source). That's thousands of text answers' worth. I did not expect that.
And small numbers add up. Billions of people are using this stuff, and data centers are expected to more than double their electricity use by 2030 (source). Also, these numbers come from the companies themselves, so it would be nice if someone outside could check them.
Privacy
This one's easy to forget. Whatever you type goes to a company's servers, and depending on your settings it might get saved or used to train future models. People tell chatbots stuff they'd never post online. I try to remember that a chat feels private but usually isn't.
Fairness
AI learns from data, so if the data is lopsided, the AI is too. In a famous 2018 study, some face-analysis systems got almost every lighter-skinned man right, but got up to 1 in 3 darker-skinned women wrong (source). Nobody meant for that to happen. That's kind of the scary part.
It made me think about my own project, SolarFlux. If I only test it on houses like mine, it might not work as well for apartments or other areas.
