A bottle of water per email: the hidden environmental costs of using AI chatbots (Wasington Post, September 18, 2024)
"While the exact burden is nearly impossible to quantify, The Washington Post worked with researchers at the University of California, Riverside to understand how much water and power Open AI's ChatGPT, using the GPT-4 language model released in March, 2023, consumes to write the average 100-word email.... Once weekly for a year by 1 out of 10 working Americans (roughly 16 millioin people) requires 435,235,476 liters, equal to the water consumed by all Rhode Island households for 1.5 days."
