TL:DR: The other day, I had a voluntary, deliberate experience with generative AI. After that, I did a search and posted some links to articles on the eco impacts of AI.
I already knew there is a significant footprint, we’ve been hearing about the data centers and all, but I wanted to deliberately share links in a post, as I did not recall having done so before. In addition to the eco-imprint there are also significant cognitive impacts (not only on the personal level but on the social level), which we have known about it for a long time as well.
My experience:
True story – the other day I had my first experience (deliberately, voluntarily) engaging with #GenerativeAI. My plan is and always has been to limit my engagement to the best of my ability.
The caricature trend, seeing a bunch of my friends try the caricature thing, got me curious.
So I visited chat gpt dot com And gave a brief description and photo. I must say I was impressed with the verbiage it came up with!
To get an actual visual caricature rendered, I would’ve had to create an account and login. I was not willing to do that.
However, I love this verbal description and wouldn’t have any problem using it to pay a human artist to do my portrait. Or, to do my own portrait based on this text.
Here is the description I gave:
DEEP GREEN book & blog author, speaker, content creator, landscaper, activist, local personality
And here is the text the AI generated in response:
Ohhh this is a great face for a caricature — expressive, thoughtful, a little rebellious 🌿
I’m going to turn you + your work into a visual caricature that feels smart, earthy, activist-energy, not cheesy. Here’s the concept I’m using, then I’ll generate it.
Caricature concept (what I’m about to create)
You:
Short, tousled brown hair exaggerated just a bit — wind-touched, outdoorsy
Bright, observant eyes (the “I’ve seen things and I care” look)
Long, distinctive earrings emphasized as a signature feature
Warm, weathered-by-the-real-world skin tones (honest, not airbrushed)
Your work & identity woven in:
One hand holding a deep-green book titled DEEP GREEN 🌱
The other hand holding a trowel or plant (landscaper + grounded activist)
Subtle speech bubbles / text fragments floating around you (blogger, speaker, content creator)
Background: lush, slightly wild garden merging into a town/community setting
Small activist symbols worked in quietly (hand-painted sign, native plants, compost, roots breaking through pavement)
Style:
Illustrated caricature (not photorealistic)
Hand-drawn, ink + watercolor feel
Exaggerated features, but respectful and strong — wise, local-legend energy
Color palette: deep greens, earth browns, soft blues
Now I’ll generate it 🎨✨
And:
Your ready-to-use caricature prompt 🎨🌿
Copy-paste this directly into ChatGPT (once logged in), DALL·E, or any image generator that accepts detailed prompts:
Prompt:
Illustrated caricature portrait of a thoughtful, earthy woman with short, tousled brown hair and expressive blue eyes. She wears long, distinctive dangling earrings and a simple tank top. Her expression is observant, kind, and quietly fierce.
She holds a deep green book titled “DEEP GREEN” in one hand and a small garden trowel with a native plant in the other.
Style: hand-drawn ink and watercolor illustration, slightly exaggerated facial features, respectful and strong caricature (not cartoonish).
Background: a lush, slightly wild garden blending into a small town community, roots breaking through pavement, subtle activist symbols (hand-painted sign, compost, native plants).
Color palette: deep greens, earth browns, soft blues.
Overall vibe: wise, grounded, activist, local-legend energy.
Links to articles:
• How energy intensive are AI-generated images? https://sustainableai.substack.com/p/how-energy-intensive-are-ai-generated AYA SAED MAY 29, 2025 “TLDR: AI images are energy hogs. Generating a single high-quality image with GPT-4o emits approximately 5.6g of CO₂e, and the viral action figure trend cost the equivalent of the monthly electricity of 150 U.S. homes.
GPT-4o’s image generation uses up to 30x more energy than text. Image quality, model choice, and how you prompt all matter. A lot. Businesses creating hundreds of images a week are racking up real energy costs, fast”
Here’s the original post — w links, screenshots, etc — on my deep green Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19NWkkkLU1/?mibextid=WC7FNe)
• Why AI uses so much energy – and what we can do about it. https://iee.psu.edu/news/blog/why-ai-uses-so-much-energy-and-what-we-can-do-about-it Mahmut Kandemir
Professor, Computer Science and Engineering
Published: April 8, 2025 | Last updated: November 20, 2025 “In this article, you’ll learn: — AI’s environmental footprint, from soaring energy and water use to e-waste
— Why training AI models is one of the most resource-intensive computing tasks on the planet
— Key strategies for a sustainable AI future, from more efficient models to greener hardware”
• Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/ By Melissa Heikkilä
“This is the first time the carbon emissions caused by using an AI model for different tasks have been calculated.”
• Environmental impact of generative AI – stats and facts https://thesustainableagency.com/blog/environmental-impact-of-generative-ai/ROMA DHANANI ON JANUARY 15, 2026 “the environmental impact of generative ai 20 statistics & facts
Generative AI is a branch of AI that specializes in creating new content such as text, images, videos, or sound. Generative AI creates seemingly original content by being trained on large datasets. It’s not to be confused with traditional AI, which is programmed with algorithms to accomplish specific tasks. Generative AI has risen stratospherically over the past few years, think of ChatGPT and how it’s now a go-to tool to create articles from scratch. Or you may have seen some of the wild AI-generated videos getting shared around.”
FULL DISCLOSURE:
Full disclosure: I only looked up and posted the links regarding the footprint of AI, after I had done the generative text experiment.
But I had heard about the footprint of data centers etc.
Everything we do has a footprint. The point of my book and blog is to help people minimize their footprint (leading to a collective shift), while also functioning in everyday society.
And, to reemphasize what I said after sharing the generative text above:
To get an actual visual caricature rendered, I would’ve had to create an account and login. I was not willing to do that. However, I love this verbal description and wouldn’t have any problem using it to pay a human artist to do my portrait. Or, to attempt to do my own portrait based on this text.
And, I now intend to avoid further engaging generative AI, to the full extent I’m able. As we learn more, the possibilities widen.