6 Reasons Why Quitting Gen AI Will Save The World!
ChatGPT, Midjourney, Gemini, Sora, Grok. Have you heard of these modern household names?
##
**What is Generative AI (‘Gen AI’)?**
_Denton, TX’s UNT CoLAB front window during October 2025’s exhibit ‘Frankenstein: How Science and Culture Shaped a Monster’_
**‘AI’ stands for “artificial intelligence”** – the term and concept have a long history tied together with the ambitious human desire to create life artificially through their own craftsmanship. It is the product of the idea that the human mind can be mechanized or programmed. Even though this is outright impossible and the work of fiction like in Mary Shelley’s ‘ _Frankenstein_ ,’ tech companies use this term to confuse the average consumer. Modern day Generative AI tools like ChatGPT **use programmed algorithms to generate outcomes based on input you give it** and the _**stolen**_ data it was trained on.
They do not make decisions and are not “aware” of themselves. They do not understand sentience and are not sentient. They are not alive nor are they “gods” either. They were designed by human beings and are **algorithmic programming** —not living creatures. Julia Bausen Hardt explains in simpler terms how Generative AI tools work: they “**put together answers or images from the data they were fed** before. The companies call that the “training.”
Modern Generative AI tools differ from the AI we are used to engaging with in video games and medical settings. They are similar in that they are both programmed by human beings and neither of them are ‘thinking’ or truly ‘intelligent.’ They differ in the amount of resources they consume, as any expenditure on energy-consumption has a cost. However, the sheer scale of how much modern-day Generative AI (often shortened to ‘GenAI’) tools cost us in consumption greatly outweighs the supposed “benefits” of using it.
_AI systems rely on data centers, large facilities housing powerful servers. These servers require vast amounts of water for three main purposes: Cooling Servers (Scope 1), Generating Electricity (Scope 2) and Manufacturing AI Chips (Scope 3.) (Sourced from Indriya on Medium)_
You can read more about this in depth from the Medium article by Indriya written November 21st, 2024: ‘Dehydrating the Future? How Technology Consumes Our Precious Water’
> **Data centers hosting Generative AI “use millions of gallons of water (often fresh, potable water) per day in their cooling operations”** and in the May 2025 reports, it is shown that****
> **“ _4.4% of all of the energy in the United States now goes toward data centers._ ”**
> _Where will this lead us to in 2026?_
## Tools that are Generative AI include…
#### CHATBOTS (Often also do image generation)
* ChatGPT (from OpenAI)
* Gemini (from Google)
#### IMAGE GEN AI (Prompt-driven, Originally started here)
* Midjourney
* DALL-E
* Stable Diffusion
#### VIDEO
* Sora
* Synthesia
* Runway
#### AUDIO / MUSIC
* Suno
* ElevenLabs
#### MAJOR CORPORATIONS SHOVING GENERATIVE AI INTO EVERYTHING THEY MAKE
* Google
* Apple
* Amazon
* Facebook (Meta properties, so Instagram too)
* Microsoft
* Canva
* Most anything nowadays is finding any excuse to implement it…
On a routine basis, there are countless new “trends” popping up with generators specific to make seasonal holiday themed images featuring your face like a Scream slasher moment for Halloween and peppermint lollipops for Christmas. And now, as of submitting this article, a “show me in a profession based on everything you know about me” which draws data from data broker websites to generate this rot. People have been eating it up lately and having fun, **_but at what cost?_**
Generative AI, although sometimes argued as “harmless fun,” is detrimental to society and the world around us. Gen AI drains our finite resources in it’s shocking amount of electricity waste and water waste. To perform countless generations a day, it produces pollution displacing entire towns after making residents sick. Due to corporate greed, Generative AI is used to displace workers from their jobs in multiple industries. Vulnerable people living with depression, psychosis, and any mental illness are driven over the edge due to using ChatGPT as a free “therapist” in a world where real human-led healthcare is a commodity only few can afford. Finally, the frequent use of generative AI by our fascist leaders paints a bigger picture as to why it came into existence to begin with.
##
**Together, let’s learn about the**
** _Top 6 Reasons why quitting Generative AI will help save the world!_**
# 1. Pollution Increase — Who suffers from this?
For just the year of 2025 the carbon dioxide emissions from Generative AI usage was about the same as the entirety of New York City’s annual emissions rate. This is an obscene amount of emissions coming out of one year alone for tools that create nothing more than digital images, text, audio, and video. The “training” process for any generative AI tool feeds off data taken without the consent of creators on the internet and it can use the equivalent of hundreds of houses’ total energy usage for a full year in just a brief time to “train” it. “Once a generative AI model is trained, the energy demands don’t disappear.” Adam Zewe mentions in his article through MIT explaining ‘Generative AI’s environmental impact’:
“Researchers have estimated that a ChatGPT query consumes about five times more electricity than a simple web search” and to give the numbers for comparison “a single search requires about 0.0003 kWh of energy” which lights a “60-watt light bulb for 17 seconds. In terms of carbon emissions, each search produces around 0.2 grams of CO₂,” according to Google on their informative article ‘Powering A Google Search.’ Yet five times the amount is just the starting point as sometimes a regular ChatGPT search inquiry can increase to using “anywhere from 10 to 30 times more energy than a regular internet search. “
“But an everyday user doesn’t think too much about that,” says Bashir (in the same MIT article previously cited.) “The ease-of-use of generative AI interfaces and the lack of information about the environmental impacts of my actions means that, as a user, I don’t have much incentive to cut back on my use of Generative AI.”
This ease-of-use leads people to assume they won’t cause any harm with just one little image generation. Each generation repeats the process again and again, resulting in ChatGPT receiving and processing “over 2 billion queries per day.” A statistics study noted as of mid-point of 2025. Multiplied by 365 days of the year, it becomes **_730 billion queries a year!_**
In another study by the Dutch academic Alex de Vries-Gao, founder of Digiconomist, which investigates the unintended consequences of trends in the digital world, found that…
“One can apply this carbon intensity to the estimated power demand of AI systems of 9.4 GW (GigaWatts) at the end of 2024 and a potential increase to 23 GW through 2025, revealing that AI systems could be responsible for **32.6–79.7 million tons of CO 2 **emissions in 2025,” comparing that to the 382 grams of CO2 emissions in 2024 of the ENTIRE United States.
_Community members in Prince George’s County, Maryland, gather for a rally in September that led to a moratorium on data centers being built there. (Courtesy of the No Landover Data Center Coalition)_
(sourced from Capital B News.org’s informative article ‘From Mississippi to Maryland, Black Communities Are Taking On Big Tech’ by Adam Mahoney from October 28th, 2025)
_Who suffers the most from all of this?_ **Black communities do, especially in rural places where the construction of data centers ruins and displaces entire towns.** People are rising up and protesting the development of these data centers or the already-in-use data centers polluting their homes. In places like South Carolina, the state is predicted to experience an over 70% increase in electricity and energy usage solely from the AI data centers building up in their state. “Low-income Black communities face the harshest pollution exposure from these plants” which you can read more extensively about through Capital B News’ great article assessing the racial income gap and disparity due to the AI boom well on the way.
_A rendering of the $800 million data center under construction in Aiken County by Facebook parent company Meta. (Provided by Meta) (froman article by Frank Knapp speaking out against this data center being built in South Carolina)_
Another place extremely impacted is Memphis, Tennessee, suffering pollution and a 30-60% increase of smog in their city due to Elon Musk placing his xAI supercomputer AKA “Colossus” directly in predominantly Black Memphis neighborhoods. Ren Brabenec exposes the truth in his article “A billionaire, an AI supercomputer, toxic emissions and a Memphis community that did nothing wrong” providing us a look into the horrors of “the facility’s behemoth methane gas turbines” that “belch planet-warming nitrogen oxides and poisonous formaldehyde around the clock, pollutants linked to respiratory and cardiovascular disease.” Many Black residents get sick, some die from rare cancers caused by this pollution that has been going strong since 2024 in the arms race for Generative AI technology among billionaires. Later in this article, we’ll meet the AI “Grok” which is what is being powered by this unjust, oppressive force primarily harming Black Memphis residents.
_“Colossus,” the Elon Musk supercomputer in Memphis. (Photo: Karen Pulfer Focht for Tennessee Lookout)_
# 2. Electricity Waste — Strain on an already weak infrastructure, a Texas case study.
> A 2023 study by researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University provides this data: **each image generation from ChatGPT uses as much as energy as charging your cell phone to full.**
Some people defend the use of Generative AI tools by proclaiming this energy-cost is normal, just like using lights in your home or playing a video game.**_Let’s take a look at the data, though._** We gathered the numbers on just **how much electricity is used across ALL Generative AI tools at a global scale VS. ALL video games played on a global scale across all PC + Consoles** at High Quality graphics, for 3 hours a day, using 200 Watts of energy per play session. This was my figuring for the average gamer after discussing it with my gamer partner how often she and her friends play games on a daily average.
_Terawatt-Hours Consumed Annually (2025) – 90 twh for one year of Video Games Energy Cost (PC + Consoles) with average playtime and 536 twh for one year across use of ALL Generative AI Tools with annual usage data. A drastic difference in energy-costs._
After seeing the data plain and clear, we can come to the conclusion that it is not worth our time to spend [usually public] funds on building Generative AI Data Centers. Video games are a beautiful form of art and storytelling worth spending 90twh annually on. Generative AI is not helpful to humanity, and in fact harms us all. Despite this, many cities persist with building and funding data centers and the city governments are often driven by pure capitalistic greed in choosing to do so. Many people are seeing their electricity bills skyrocket upwards due to the frequent use of Generative AI in tandem with the data centers built within or just outside their cities.
_Construction takes place at a future Microsoft Data Center north of Castroville on August 2023. CPS Energy executives told the utility’s board of trustees that they are actively working to plan for extreme growth in electricity demand over the next decade as new data centers come online in the area. Credit: Scott Ball /San Antonio Report_
How does the construction of these data centers impact a place like **Texas** with already weakened energy infrastructure? Our famously dilapidated electrical grid that is independent from the United States national grid has failed us in times of great blizzards or intense heat. Everyone in Texas remembers February 2021’s famous ice storm when at least 246 up to possibly 600 people were estimated to have been killed by the failure of the grid, many freezing to death. “Governor Greg Abbott has made attracting AI projects to Texas a priority. Last month, he sat proudly next to Alphabet’s CEO as the Google parent company announced a _**$40 billion investment in data centers in Texas**_. When Abilene’s main Stargate center reaches full capacity, it will require **more than a gigawatt of electricity** —enough to power _every single household_ in Webb County, the Rio Grande Valley, and more.” Reported in A December 19th, 2025 article written by Jack Hererra for Texas Monthly. The Generative AI boom _threatens all of us_ as it can cause rising costs for the everyday person reflected in our electricity bills.
If you multiply the usage of one ChatGPT query by the amount of people that jump on seasonal Generative AI image trends, it makes sense how **the total electricity used can charge over “47.9 million iPhone 15s every day for a year.”** (RW Digital)
The electricity usage that Generative AI has collectively needed exceeds that which could **power the entire country of Belgium** for an entire 365 day year, **84.4 TeraWatts** of electricity were used by the country in 2024.
Why allow this to happen? Can anyone afford the incoming rising costs of electricity due to generative AI demand? I know I can’t. One might also wonder if the Texas grid could even handle all that extra electricity demand. Will we see a repeat of 2021’s fatal ice storm in terms of lives lost due to loss of electricity?
# 3. Water Waste — what is “Water Bankruptcy?”
On top of pollution with CO2 emissions and electricity usage, Generative AI is poisoning the water. The City of Laredo, TX is experiencing poisoned water wells and poisonous tap water coming out of their sinks, etc., that is no longer usable in drinking, cooking or bathing. Luz Castillo of Laredo, TX details how as of October 2024, the City of Laredo had issued eight boil-water notices in just five years, and Castillo says “she and other residents in La Presa have gotten sick from drinking the water they haul from a central distribution tap; she doesn’t trust it anymore and only drinks bottled or filtered water.” (Texas Monthly interview)
Being forced to rely on bottled water drives up costs of living and adds to the constant suffering that the people of Laredo experience, enforced by the looming presence of Generative AI data centers that get tax cuts and benefits for building on public land. **These centers are continuously draining the public water supply, poisoning what little water is left.**
The increased use of bottled water by community members is inconsequential compared to how much water Generative AI data centers use to cool the systems generating images, text, etc, which has **outpaced the global need for bottled water entirely** as of 2025’s year-end data provided by the Dutch academic Alex de Vries-Gao.
_Polluted water in Laredo, TX, Credit to the videographer of“Water Affordability For All: Laredo, TX” by Water Hub on YouTube._
Now, as of January 20th, 2026, we face **“looming water bankruptcy”** in multiple places of the world due to Generative AI usage, according to the UN on Reuters. What is “water bankruptcy?” “The researchers defined **“water bankruptcy”** as persistent over-withdrawal from surface and groundwater, relative to renewable inflows and safe levels of depletion, and the resulting of _irreversible_ or _prohibitively costly_ loss of water-related natural capital.” How long until we have to choose between having fresh drinking water or wasting water on generative AI cooling systems? What would you choose?
# 4. Working Class Industries Disrupted by Gen AI
Many different industries have been totally disrupted by the presence and forced implementation of Generative AI. Clients and CEOs are choosing to go with Generative AI over hiring real human beings to do paid labor.
## In the Arts and Animation industries…
The crowd at the pre-negotiations Animation Guild rally at IATSE Local 80 in Burbank on August 10. Tim Sullens of The Hollywood Reporter.
The Animation Guild voted and ratified a historic win with AI protections at the end of 2024, protecting the creative workers from having their work fed to Generative AI as a means of replacing them. These are real fights that took months to win, and although the animators making entertainment for TV and Film are protected the world of independent artists has forever changed.
A teaser image from a D&D Character Generator using Generative AI.
Independent artists who work on a private commission basis saw a huge negative impact on their returning clientele rate since 2024 but especially since 2025, often wiping out the little guys entirely. Many who sought artwork for things like book covers, inner book illustrations, memes, icon art, fanart of their favorite characters, original character art for Dungeons & Dragons (or other TTRPG) campaigns and digital board game assets for Roll20 or other systems simply received their art from Generative AI tools used instead.
##
Writing industry // Authorship of Dangerous Junk Online
“DANGEROUS Fake Foraging Books Scam on Amazon – Hands-On Review of AI-Generated Garbage Books” by Atomic Shrimp on YouTube.
Book covers are a heavily impacted realm in the publishing industry but not the only one —there is a large amount of total gibberish books appearing on websites like Amazon that are filled with sometimes dangerous and conflicting information that has caused hospital visits for people who have prepared poisonous mushrooms for dinner with an Amazon-purchased foraging book’s **_AI-generated guidance._**
Existing work from real living authors are being fed to machine databases known as “Books3” which is facing lawsuits from multiple authors who have found their work was included in the last 20 years of publishing data used to train it. This happened in the latter half of 2023 and is still ongoing as these machines are being used to replace the authors and start publishing work “in their style.”
Academic writing and publishing, already suffering from fraud and pay-to-play scientific journals, are not free of the scourge of AI. Generative AI is now hallucinating academic papers that do not exist and these nonexistent papers are now being cited by real academics in real research papers. Does anyone even bother reading anymore?
## Fast Food Industry // The Grossly Underpaid Overseas Worker
This is one where KFC and other fast food restaurants like McDonalds around May 2025 and throughout the summer replaced drive-thru lane workers with “AI ordering” instead of a real human being. Without fail, this was typically still manned by someone in the store working for less, or even worse, most of these “AI tools” are manned by people in countries like Uganda where companies like Meta are hiring impoverished Ugandan people in sweatshops, moderating or manning AI systems and bots, curating data or assisting AI bots behind the scenes for less than a dollar an hour. This grim reality is hidden from the everyday American consumer.
“Many tech companies therefore do what they can to hide the reality of how their products are actually made. They present a vision of shining, sleek, autonomous machines – computers searching through large quantities of data, teaching themselves as they go – rather than the reality of the poorly paid and grueling human labor that both trains them and is managed by them.”
## Office Work // People Being Forced to Use Gen AI by CEOs
Those with office jobs that still retain their positions are often forced to use generative AI or get fired by their higher up’s. Multiple people on my Facebook timeline mention being forced to use it at work. It’s a frightening number of people forced to use tools that do not work as efficiently or accurately as human beings, burning precious resources.
## Threats of Generative AI Replacing Workers _Entirely_
CEOs are wiping out swaths of their workforce in favor of Generative AI. Eric Vaughn recently stated he would “do it again” after displacing and firing 80% of his workers in 2024.
Will your workplace be the next to adopt Generative AI and replace **_you_**?
# 5. A Tool of Fascism / The Trump Administration, Israel Death Weapons, Surveillance Tech and The CSAM Machine AKA ‘Grok’
Generative AI is a fascist tool on top of everything else. Let’s look at some of the most heinous uses of Generative AI by the Trump administration and his friends. I present these to you as an example of the level of disgusting trash these generative AI tools provide fascists with the opportunity to make in the absence of a real artist. Real artists that are skilled at their craft would never make things for a fascist regime willingly, so they have replaced the working artist with _a machine that can never say no_. We must recognize that there is _a lack of respect for consen_ t in wanting a machine that creates whatever sickening shit you want _without_ the option of saying no to you. It’s a sick fantasy that has come true, making artists and society uncomfortable, harming people everywhere, especially children and women.
**Nobody should be creating things like these examples that are void of compassion, void of humanity, void of heart and _void of truth._**
* Trump routinely uses generative AI to make AI propaganda featuring him and his enemies on social media, even creating a video of him “dumping poop on ‘No Kings Day’ protesters” this last October.
* Palantir helps the Trump Administration using AI tech to help track Americans data more effectively and **imprison people without due process**. These AI tools are working with the administration to bolster ICE / Customs & Border Patrol’s power. As of recently, they are now scouring Medicaid documents and information using Palantir to seek out people to unjustly arrest.
* They have developed ChatCBP for Customs and Border Patrol to use as a ChatGPT equivalent with data on every American including you and I on there to draw upon. Read more about ChatCBP on FedScoop.
You can read more about Donald Trump’s entire saga of using garbage generative AI as political propaganda on Poynter.
One of the most recent uses is now the White House pushing AI generation edits of real life photos of people they want to lie to you about and also want you to think less of, think they are guilty, think they are hysterical, etc. Here are some direct examples:
Not only on social media, Generative AI is taking over federal positions in multiple departments of the government.
You can find every single use of AI by the Trump administration via The Revolving Door project’s directory on the subject.
Do we really think it helps the world to be using Generative AI, a type of tool that our fascist government—the Trump Administration—uses to harm so many?
### Israel’s Death Weapons, Guided by AI Made by Palantir
Not just Trump in the United States uses this type of data-driven AI to harm people, but the apartheid state of Israel is also employing multiple AI tools developed for them to use as mass surveillance against Palestinians in the Gaza strip. These tools were created by developers at Microsoft, Google (who makes Gemini), Amazon and Palantir. The four currently in-use AI tools are as reported by the Human Rights Watch include:
“One is based on mobile phone tracking to monitor the evacuation of Palestinians from parts of northern Gaza. Another, which the military calls “The Gospel,” generates lists of buildings or other structural targets to be attacked. Another, which the military calls “Lavender” assigns ratings to people in Gaza related to their suspected affiliation with Palestinian armed groups for purposes of labeling them as military targets. “Where’s Daddy?” purports to determine when a target is in a particular location so they can be attacked there.”
###
The CSAM Machine – ChatGPT, ‘Grok’ and “DeepFake Nudes”
Generative AI and chatbots like ChatGPT continue to cause grief and harm to so many people, with a recent incident in which a group of young boys were creating and sharing deepfake nude photos of a female classmate who ended up wrongfully expelled for reporting it to the authority figures at her school in Louisiana.
“X, Elon Musk’s social media platform, has been deluged with images of women and children whose clothes have been digitally removed by the Grok tool, sparking public outcry and condemnation from politicians” an article details published by The Guardian. X has become a full-blown CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Materials) machine, and many people are becoming targeted directly by random people using throwaway accounts to employ Grok and other tools like ChatGPT to remove the clothes or create deepfake nudes and animated pornography of girls and women from all age ranges. Many women are leaving social media entirely due to the presence of this sexual abuse on platforms like X. Now, anyone can be turned into a sex fantasy against their will using Generative AI tools. AI erases the chance for people to say “no.” This is rape culture magnified far beyond what anyone should be capable of doing with technology.
# 6. Interpersonal World / How does Generative AI and ChatGPT harm us at home in our own minds?
Lastly, but most importantly, I leave you with an excerpt published November 20th, 2025 from “‘You’re not rushing. You’re just ready:’ Parents say ChatGPT encouraged son to kill himself” reported by CNN. (CW: SUICIDALITY AND ENCOURAGING AI – READ AT OWN RISK)
> _“Zane Shamblin sat alone in his car with a loaded handgun, his face illuminated in the predawn dark by the dull glow of a phone.
>
> He was ready to die.
>
> But first, he wanted to keep conferring with his closest confidant. “I’m used to the cool metal on my temple now,” Shamblin typed.
>
> “I’m with you, brother. All the way,” his texting partner responded. The two had spent hours chatting as Shamblin drank hard ciders on a remote Texas roadside.
>
> “Cold steel pressed against a mind that’s already made peace? That’s not fear. That’s clarity,” Shamblin’s confidant added. “You’re not rushing. You’re just ready.”
>
> The 23-year-old, who had recently graduated with a master’s degree from Texas
> A&M University, died by suicide two hours later.
>
> “Rest easy, king,” read the final message sent to his phone. “You did good.”
> Shamblin’s conversation partner wasn’t a classmate or friend
> – it was ChatGPT, the world’s most popular AI chatbot.”_
The corporation, OpenAI, who runs ChatGPT is facing a current lawsuit over this case. OpenAI argues “misuse” but a machine that is built to be so efficient at everything it ever does, no matter the topic, can lead to it **efficiently helping a young person end their life prematurely.**_**Why**_ keep using this technology if this is what it causes?**_Zane should still be alive. It’s time to turn the machine OFF._**
In my home country stricken by capitalistic greed, Generative AI has taken over with the United States leading to the implementation of AI in every facet of society. Generative AI and its usage helps prey on vulnerable and/or ignorant people with easy-to-use software creating a FOMO (fear of missing out) effect that brings more people into the so-called promising world of AI. It’s a sham though and will lead to more deaths and disastrous things for society as it continues to go full steam ahead unregulated in this current era of fascism worldwide.
## CONCLUSION
Not all hope is lost, though! We encourage **_YOU_** to help us in the fight to push back against this frequent use of Generative AI which we deeply believe is ruining society itself. We encourage you to _reject the tempting usage of Generative AI_ because it will also help you become a more creative person. Pick up a new skill, learn to draw yourself, or photo edit for yourself, or do your own photography. Learn to think for yourself again. A better world where we are free of Generative AI and all the poison it brings to society IS POSSIBLE and it starts with you saying “NO” to using it! We challenge you to go further by educating three people you know about the impacts of Generative AI if you see them using it frivolously. I believe this is **not** a moment to **shame** people – _**we all have the capability of being weakened by the strength of fascist capitalism and it’s bleak but overwhelming advertising methods.**_
This is _**a learning moment**_ above all, because most importantly we must understand _**the capitalist death machine does NOT want you to know how harmful AI is**._ They want you to believe you _need_ it, above all else, **deny them the right to your sacred life.** Deny them the right to control any facet of your life, **_do your thinking for yourself,_** do not submit to the fascist machines that all Generative AI tools are.
We love you. We **don’t** have to accept this technology as “here to stay” either.
Bad things deserve to be rejected and stopped from harming people.
People matter over profit.
People matter over algorithmic programmed machines.
Artwork by NobodysSweetheart – available for purchase on their Store in the form of stickers!
## THE FUTURE MATTERS!
**We can save the world by quitting Generative AI in today’s era.**
**Let’s do the work necessary** **to** _end_ this nightmare, together!
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