“I asked ChatGPT…” “I used AI to make this…” “ChatGPT says that…” “Did you see the new AI video of…” Stop. How many movies about AI taking over does it take for the Earth’s population to realize it’s going to take over the world? Obviously not enough, as we are currently in the beginning stages of AI replacing our jobs, ruining our environment, and de-normalizing all original human thought and work. AI videos and images have gotten so hyper realistic over even the past few months, that it is beginning to get difficult to tell what is real and what is not. It starts with AI essays and emails, eventually stretches to AI videos, images, and art, and eventually will turn into full-on AI robots, the likes of a Marvel plot line. Before we can even fathom it, AI will be everywhere we look, in fact, it already is.
From the AI asmr videos captivating teens with short attention spans, to AI photos circulating FaceBook, fooling boomers, to the constant use of Chat-GPT among students simply to scrape by in school, AI is infiltrating our minds and lives like never before. No one can escape it.
In a recent study done by MIT, as summarized by TIME Magazine, the study had several ChatGPT users and non-ChatGPT users write SAT essays. For the first round of essays the ChatGPT users were tasked with writing the essay using ChatGPT and the non-ChatGPT users were tasked with writing the essay using only their knowledge. While these essays were written, MIT researchers studied the brain activity of both groups and found that the ChatGPT users had significantly lower brain engagement than the non-ChatGPT users while writing these essays. In fact, over the course of the month-long study, the ChatGPT users got progressively more lazy when writing, some even pulling a simple copy and paste.
The essays produced by the ChatGPT users were the work of either the classic copy and paste or the blatant stealing of ChatGPT’s all too neutral and unoriginal ideas and putting it in their own words. There is no critical thinking in that. Using ChatGPT completely takes away the thinking that goes into an essay. It gives you an argument, a point of view lacking nuance, and the right vocabulary to sound sophisticated enough, completely eradicating the process of thinking for yourself. With any prompt put in ChatGPT, whether that be an essay or even just a plea for ideas, we lose a quintessential human quality–original thought.
I will admit, I have used ChatGPT from time to time to help me think of titles or the like, but once I made the slightly embarrassing realization that many years ago there was a time where people didn’t rely on AI bots to come up with simple things and instead just used their minds and I vowed to just come up with everything on my own. I don’t want to lose that skill It is important to be able to use your own brain for these little things because before you know it ChatGPT will be installed in our homes telling us what to wear and eat and how to live our lives devoid of any originality and critical thinking, forming our brains into smoother and smoother wads of gum on the bottoms of the shoes of future generations trying to undo the damage AI is already having on us.
AI’s damage is not only harming our brains, but its effect on the environment is on route to further destroy our planet and speed up climate change. According to Earth.org, just training the AI bots “produces about 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide … the equivalent of around 300 round-trip flights between New York and San Francisco.” As AI evolves and more and more of it is created and implemented into day to day life, the carbon dioxide emissions will only grow, joined in conjunction with every other factor worsening our environment, and we have a completely avoidable catastrophe on our hands, that we have willed upon the world. .
Everytime someone uses ChatGPT, the system produces energy and must be cooled down by vast amounts of water to continue to function and not overheat. According to Forbes, one ChatGPT conversation “uses about fifty centilitres of water, equivalent to one plastic bottle.” While that might not seem like a lot, over 1 billion conversations are had with ChatGPT each day, meaning that around 500,000,000 liters of water is needed to cool down the operating system used to power ChatGPT.
While many are confused as to how this use of water is harmful to our environment, it is quite simple. Water is an extremely important factor in climate change. With many extreme weather events such as hurricanes and floods happening, water becomes polluted and less-accessible. We cannot control the weather, but what we can control is how we use water. While the water used to cool down the operating systems isn’t all wasted, a majority of it evaporates due to the heat of the energy the water is used to cool down. By using ChatGPT we are actively wasting millions of liters of water each day, making our water supply more scarce and directly contributing to climate change, just to make our lives a bit easier. Which, ironically, is making our futures on this earth a lot harder.
And since so much water is used each day and a huge factor of that is evaporated and wasted, using ChatGPT is directly responsible for the waste of water and the worsening of climate change. So instead of asking ChatGPT for some good ideas, take out a notebook and pen, make a bullet list, and use that brain.