Two years ago, I hit the “try ChatGPT” button and felt the adrenaline rush of instant copy.
Today Beach Weather produces more words with silicon than with keyboards. Incredible? Absolutely. Innocent? Hardly.
Here’s the plot twist nobody likes to watch:
- A single GPT-4 query is whispered across racks of GPUs sipping more electricity than an office kettle and evaporating cups of clean water to keep themselves cool.
- Video-first marketers now pump out synthetic clips as if rendering costs nothing. (It does - the grid just sends the invoice to the planet.)
- Law firm blogs are sprouting faster than legal disclaimers; some are brilliant, others read like robo-confetti because nobody bothered to fact-check the bot or make it sound like the firm’s ‘voice’.
I’m not anti-AI; I’m an early adopter. But the deeper I dig into energy dashboards, the louder the question rings: What is the hidden tariff of convenience?
The fog of “where”
Ask any provider where last night’s workload actually ran. Oregon? Ireland? Johannesburg’s coal-heavy grid at 3 a.m.? You’ll get a brand video about “net-zero commitments” and very few hard numbers on megawatt-hours or litres of cooling water.
Until we see an “AI Energy Rating” label - think fridge-stickers for Large Language Models - we’re shopping blind.
The misuse subplot
- Lawyers who paste a client’s confidential brief into a public chatbot gamble with privilege.
- Marketers who regen thumbnails 40 times to get the “perfect gradient” burn through compute the way popcorn burns through an office microwave.
Neither group is malicious; both are seduced by speed and (apparent) zero marginal cost.
Our working rules at Beach Weather
- Smallest model that solves the task. If GPT-3.5 drafts it, GPT-4o stays asleep.
- One-shot, human-edit. Draft once, refine offline. Endless rerolls are environmental clickbait.
- Green-cloud first. We try to locate projects in regions with real-time renewables or we reschedule them.
- Measure & tell. Starting this quarter, we’ll publish a “kWh & H₂O per 1 000 words” line in our ESG note. Not perfect, but a start.
I’m proud of how quickly we grabbed the AI steering wheel. I’m equally determined we don’t drive it off an ecological cliff.
If you’re cranking out AI content, ask yourself: Would I hit “generate” this often if a real-time energy meter blinked red on my screen?
The credits are going to roll on the era of “free compute.” Better to rewrite the script now than get surprise-billed later.
