With the lawsuits, billions of dollars it takes to build and then sustain the data centers holding AI software, and the gallon of water it takes just to answer one question, many are reconsidering the decision to make AI more advanced and evolved with the technology currently available to us.
But what even is AI?
AI, or Artificial Intelligence, is a generic term for technology that can process information and mimic human thinking.
According to IBM, “technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision making, and creativity.”
For example, when typing into a Google search bar, the search engine will generate what it thinks you will write next in front of what you have already typed, labeled as a suggestion.
While not always correct, and certainly not dependable, AI has become increasingly active in industries such as computer technology, healthcare, and finance.
What are the current uses of AI in our day-to-day life?
While AI (Artificial Intelligence) has been around since the 1950s, the rapid growth in technology, mainly the increase of computer power, is causing the growth of companies based around Artificial Intelligence, such as OpenAI and Grok, to expand.
the number of AI-based lawsuits, and gallons of water being wasted on cooling hardware, is growing to numbers that our economy cannot withstand.
For Example, OpenAI was sued recently for providing legal advice to a lawyer, and “acting as an unlicensed lawyer” (Reuters), during a trial, and CharacterAI was sued by Pennsylvania for “representing themselves as licensed medical professionals and providing medical advice” (CBS News).
What is AI doing, or going to do, to our environment?
The amount of electricity that data centers demand for cooling the AI softwares is “a major factor contributing to the environmental impacts of AI” (MIT News). Data Centers are temperature controlled buildings that house computing infrastructure (servers, network equipment, or data storing drives). While data centers have been around since the 1940s, the advancement of AI is demanding growth in the construction of Data Centers.
An example of a company with data centers is Amazon, with more than 100 centers worldwide, each with 50,000 servers that support the company’s cloud services.
According to MIT News, “Beyond electricity demands, a great deal of water is needed to cool the hardware used for training, deploying, and fine-tuning generative AI models, which can strain municipal water supplies and disrupt local ecosystems.”
There are conflicting opinions on how much water AI software actually consumes, due to accounts of signed NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) about the actual use of water by these companies. One opinion is that AI depends on about a gallon of water per question asked, in order to cool their hardware, which, in a week, adds up to more than New York uses in a year. “A single facility requesting more than 100 percent of the water consumed by a city’s residents is nothing to sneeze at” (Undark).
Can AI answer questions better than a human could?
Humans are biased, whether if its because of where they grew up, or the type of people they’ve been around. Because AI is programmed by humans, and draws answers and information from the internet that is filled with the information and thoughts of biased humans, AI is programmed to be bias about certain things. According to SNHU.EDU, “The fact is that the AI chatbot you consulted didn’t create the bias. Instead, its output reflects the bias of multiple sources that the chatbot draws from.”
But if there are these negatives, what are the people who want AI around focused on improving?
While there are both positives and negatives to AI, in our day and age, the amount of negatives drastically outweigh the positives. Before AI got as popular as it is right now, there was already struggle with the amount of clean, fresh water we have access to as a planet. So what are the people who DO want Artificial Intelligence present in our lives, focused on?
Those who want to have Artificial Intelligence present in day-to-day life are mainly focused on the minimal error, because of the lack of impact from outside forces. For example, in healthcare, AI robots called precision robots lessen the probability of human error, because of the fact that they are programmed with what to do, and dont carry the risk of waking up late for it, being tired, or not being able to focus, as human surgeons could have. AI Robots and search engines are also available 24/7, and are able to answer on multiple devices at once worldwide.
What does this mean?
There are enough both positives and negatives to AI, so the likelihood of AI being cut off, or even regulated, is unlikely, because the people focused on the positives are mainly the companies that can afford to invest and keep privately funding them, such as Amazon and Softbank for OpenAI, who have respectively invested about $30 billion in the company since February 2026.
With these investments comes the concern that AI will never be able to produce the revenue to pay back their debts, and according to Yahoo Finance, “OpenAI will not turn a profit until 2030,” and according to Medium, “The Information analysed OpenAI’s predictions and found that they were on track to post a $14 billion loss in 2026.” Once the AI bubble pops, which, if companies such as OpenAI keep failing to make a profit to pay back their investors, will happen, our economy will crash. Predictions of when exactly this will happen are plenty, but are also talking about over the next year, with some even predicting for it to happen by next week. Reasons for the bubble bursting are widespread, with it ranging from lack of any productive growth, to realizing just how useless these machines really are.
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