It’s hard to imagine an environmental impact from our online activities. After all, the virtual world is not a physical place. But computing uses much more electricity than just the battery in your laptop. Data centers use water to keep machines cool while they burn through all that electricity to process our data. And few online activities are as thirsty as the tech world’s latest darling, ChatGPT.
Unless you’ve been living completely off-grid this year, you’ve probably heard the buzz about ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence (AI) products from Google, Meta, and other tech giants. But understanding it might be a different matter. ChatGPT is an AI tool released in November 2022 by the Microsoft-backed company OpenAI. Although ChatGPT gets most of the press, it’s not the only option for generative AI. All of them are designed to answer questions and follow…