ai Think before AI
Frequently asked thinkbeforeai.org

Questions,
answered.

What a request costs, how we know, and what to do about it.

The basics

Are you against AI?
No, we use it too. A language model is a useful tool. The campaign is about one habit: reaching for it on reflex, for things you could do yourself, without noticing what it costs. Use it where it earns its keep, and skip it where it does not.
What is this campaign?
A quiet reminder, in the spirit of the old "please consider the environment before printing" line at the bottom of emails. We want people to pause for a second before asking a machine to summarise or generate, and to know what a request actually uses.

The numbers

How much energy does one AI request use?
A typical short text answer is about 0.3 watt-hours on an efficient model, roughly what a desk lamp draws in a minute. A longer answer from a large reasoning model can be 19 watt-hours or more, closer to a minute of an electric oven. The figure depends heavily on the model and the length of the reply.
What about water?
Data centres use water to cool their servers, and power stations use water to make the electricity that runs them. Counting both, a 100-word reply can use up to about half a litre. Counting only the on-site cooling, it is a few millilitres.
Where do your figures come from?
Every number on the site is cited and linked, from Epoch AI, the International Energy Agency, and university research groups. They are estimates and vary by method, so we lean toward the higher numbers that count the full lifecycle, and we let you check the sources yourself.

Comparisons

Is printing a page worse than summarising it?
Usually yes. A printed sheet of A4 costs about five to six grams of CO2 and several litres of water, nearly all of it in making the paper. A short summary on an efficient model is a fraction of that. The campaign is not built on a single query beating a single sheet. It is built on scale, because we make billions of requests a day and many never needed making.
Is an AI answer worse than a web search?
By widely cited estimates an AI answer can draw around ten times the electricity of a plain search. The figure is contested and it shifts as models get more efficient, but the point holds either way: if a search would do, a search costs less.

What to do

So should I never use AI?
No. Use it for the things it is genuinely good at. The five questions on the main page are the whole method: if you could read it, write it, or work it out yourself in about the same time, that is usually the better choice.
Does using it less actually matter at my scale?
One request is tiny. It is worth a thought because the habit is shared by hundreds of millions of people, and the total is now measured in hundreds of terawatt-hours. Small, repeated, reflexive choices are exactly the kind that add up.
What is the lowest-impact option?
Often it is neither printing nor prompting. It is reading the thing yourself, on the screen already in front of you.