AI tools have made an already bad situation worse.
Every time you touch an AI tool, whether you’re making images or words, you’re feeding a machine that drinks real water and eats real power. Not in theory. Literally. There’s no harmless cloud floating above us. There are data centers on the ground, towers pulling heat out, plants burning fuel, all so content can come out faster while the bill gets paid somewhere else.
Think of it this way. One text request to a large AI model uses roughly the same amount of water as a few mouthfuls from a soda can. That sounds small until you remember these systems handle billions of requests a day! At that scale, we’re not talking about sips. We’re talking about entire truckloads of bottled drinks being poured straight down the drain, every single day, just to keep servers cool.
Generating a single AI image uses several times more energy than a text request. One article with five or six AI images might be using the equivalent electricity of leaving a laptop running for hours. Multiply that by thousands of articles, social posts, newsletters and ads, and suddenly it’s not trivial at all.
Zoom out a little more and the picture gets uglier. AI-related data centers are already using as much electricity as mid-sized cities. Estimates put global AI power demand on track to rival places like San Francisco or Boston within a few years. That’s millions of homes worth of electricity being burned so companies can automate writing, art and video at scale. AI doesn’t just steal jobs, it steals our resources.
Now stack dozens of these facilities across drought-prone states and you start to see why people are angry.
And they are angry.
Lately, I’ve seen organizers in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia mobilize against new data center construction. Nobody wants these things in their communities. They strain power grids, drain water supplies and mostly benefit companies that don’t live there (don’t they always?). Luckily, these fights seem to be working. Projects are being delayed, while others are being stopped altogether. We can and will win against these tech oligarchs, but first, we need to be smart about our usage.
This is why it’s so frustrating to see articles about resistance, climate justice or helping nature paired with AI-written images. You can’t talk about fighting extraction while actively participating in it. You can’t warn about corporate overreach while relying on the most opaque, resource-hungry tech industry on the planet.
And it’s not just images. AI-written articles, AI-edited videos, AI voiceovers, all of it runs on the same infrastructure. Longer outputs mean more compute. Videos are especially brutal, far more than text or AI generated images. That one slick AI video you just posted (or liked) could represent the electricity use of a household for days. Yes, dayzz!
The worst part is how little transparency there is. AI companies won’t clearly say how much water or energy a specific model or request uses. Communities are asked to trust them, just like users are. Meanwhile the meters keep spinning.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying we need to go off-grid or stop using technology entirely, but we should start making conscious choices. Take your own photos. Use art made by real people. Scan a drawing, even a bad one. Use stock photos from photographers who actually went outside and did the work. Write things yourself or don’t write at all!
If you’re serious about resistance, about protecting nature, about fighting back against corporate power, your tools matter. Using AI by default, especially for images and media, actively undermines your message. People feel that contradiction, even if they don’t always have the numbers to explain it.
Food for thought.
Thank you for stopping by.
Teekay.
Teekay Rezeau-Merah 