Doing the math on AI guilt

You might be hesitant to try AI because of the scary headlines about its environmental impact. I get it. I’m someone who actually thinks about this kind of thing a lot - I take the bus instead of rideshares, order delivery maybe once a month, and try to do as many errands on foot as possible. I’m an optimizer at heart.Every choice we make is a trade-off. You might not think twice about scrolling social media, driving a few minutes to the gym, or ordering DoorDash. People get value or pleasure out of those activities, so they accept the carbon cost.What if I told you that a minute of doomscrolling on TikTok is the same as 100 AI prompts? That a 10 minute errand is 60,000 AI prompts? And wait until you hear about your average shower. Let’s break it down…The Environmental Impact of AIThe number I’m using to calculate AI prompt usage is based on lightweight text-based AI models like Gemini “Fast”. These use about .03g of carbon per prompt (Generating video is higher, but I’m going to focus on text prompting here.)We should also consider the cost of training the models, not just using them. But my research found that, spread across hundreds of millions of users, this actually adds little to the environmental cost.The Cost of Doomscrolling🤯 One MINUTE of watching TikTok uses nearly 100 times the carbon of a single AI prompt.The average TikTok user spends over 45 MINUTES a day scrolling.This is the equivalent of over four thousand simple AI prompts a day. But hey, I’m not here to judge - maybe the cat videos ARE adding that much value to your life.The Cost of Driving🤯 A standard 10-minute car trip (in a sedan, not even an SUV!) emits as much carbon as approximately 60,000 AI prompts.If you use an AI prompt to help you identify a part, troubleshoot a repair, or optimize your grocery list so you skip one drive to the store, you have essentially pre-paid your carbon debt for the next several years of text-based AI use.Water UseHow long was your last shower?An 8-minute shower uses between 16 and 40 gallons of water (depending on the efficiency of the showerhead). A flash model is estimated to use 0.26 milliliters per prompt. 🤯 Even if you have an efficient showerhead, the shower would use the water equivalent of 230,769 AI prompts!DisclaimerMy math is based on specific figures I’ve found - and while they may not be perfect (it’s notoriously difficult to estimate AI use), I still feel confident in encouraging people to consider the value versus impact of ALL of their daily activities, not just AI prompts.Sources* Carbon Footprint of a Simple AI Prompt * Measuring the environmental impact of AI inference | Google Cloud Blog* TikTok* TikTok’s annual carbon footprint is likely bigger than Greece’s, study finds - The Guardian* TikTok’s 50-Million-Ton Carbon Crisis: Almost 7x Bigger Than Meta’s Footprint* Car Trip* Greenhouse Gas Emissions from a Typical Passenger Vehicle | US EPA* Shower Water Use* EPA: Save Water and Energy by Showering Better (calculator) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit athomewithai.substack.com