ChatGPT outage makes people think and gives the planet a breather
With the ChatGPT crashing out for a day, it is finally up and running, and the jokes about people not being able to live without it are flooding the internet.
One Reddit user said: "Good thing it wasn't during the school year or a lot of our "students" would "fail".
Another commented: "Now people will have to think for themselves for a while, the horror 😱".
For a silly-sounding situation, it does give some food for thought. Where is society going if people get stressed about the AI app not working for a day?
Lisa Stanley, Chief Sustainability Officer and Co-Founder of Zero, the sustainable money app, says: "The reaction to ChatGPT's outage is revealing. The level of panic shows just how dependent society has become on high-energy, cloud-based AI tools - often without fully understanding their environmental footprint."
The sustainability officer adds: "These AI systems rely on vast amounts of energy, much of which still comes from non-renewable sources. Not to mention the huge amounts of other resources, including minerals and water. Even a short-term drop-in usage, like we've seen yesterday, gives a meaningful breather for the planet."
Business Energy UK reports that ChatGPT consumes as much electricity each day as it would take to power the Empire State Building for a year and a half. On a global scale, it also uses approximately 39.16 million gallons of water daily—comparable to the entire Taiwanese population flushing a toilet simultaneously. That's the scale of energy and resource demand behind the software.
The Co-Founder of Zero notes that: "We don't need to unplug, but we need to be able to access more information on the environmental impacts of our digital usage, be more mindful in the scale and frequency of our AI usage and, finally, choose the most appropriate and efficient AI tools for the task at hand."
Following the ChatGPT outage, funny comments on Reddit are true to a degree. It highlights society's growing dependence on AI tools and raises serious questions about digital sustainability.