By Leo S. Lo, Dean of Libraries; Advisor to the Provost for AI Literacy; Professor of Education, University of Virginia

Artificial intelligence systems are thirsty, consuming as much as 500 milliliters of water, a single-serving water bottle, for each short conversation a user has with the GPT-3 version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT system.

They use roughly the same amount of water to draft a 100-word email message. That figure includes the water used to cool the data center’s servers and the water consumed at the power plants generating the electricity to run them.

But the study that calculated those estimates also pointed out that AI systems’ water usage can vary widely, depending on where and when the computer answering the query is running.

To me, as an academic librarian and professor of e

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