I Built an AI That Tells You How Much Water It Just Drank

In June the UN asked every major AI company to publish its water footprint. Most still haven’t. So I built the version that does.

Ask ChatGPT a question and something happens that nobody puts on the receipt.

Somewhere, a server heats up. Somewhere else, a cooling tower evaporates water to carry that heat away. And somewhere further back — usually much further back — a power plant burns through more water to make the electricity that ran the whole thing.

You will never see any of it. There is no number on the screen. There is no line item. The interface is a text box and a blinking cursor, and the cost is somebody else’s problem in somebody else’s county.

I got stuck on that. Not on whether AI is good or bad — on the fact that a product this widely used has a physical footprint that is essentially invisible to the person using it.