Spoiler – it’s not £20 a month!
If you’ve ever met me or even read my blog before, you probably know that I’m not a fan of AI. I think it has its place, but a lot of the things people are using it for now just don’t work. No matter how hard you try to crowbar them in. What’s worse, committing to using AI as an integral part of your business can be much more expensive than you realise in both money, time, and damage to our planet.
What Do I Mean By AI?
I know this seems like a daft point, but bear with me. Because AI has been around for a lot longer than most people think. You see, AI is a catch-all term for a group of technologies that can process information and, superficially at least, mimic human thinking. This includes things like Gemini and Chat GPT, but it also includes voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, sat nav technology, facial and fingerprint technology, and even predictive text, which has been around since the 70s!
Safe to say, things like predictive text aren’t what we’re talking about today! Instead, I want to talk about the newer iterations of AI – the Chat GPTs and their like, which business and people are using for all sorts of tasks, from data processing to calendar management and even planning.
So, What Does it Really Cost?
As with everything in life, there’s more to AI than meets the eye. When I talk to people about AI, they’re not surprised that I’m not a fan. After all, it’s a ‘threat to my job’, isn’t it? But the thing is, using AI in your business, especially if you rely heavily on it, has a lot of strings and costs associated with it. Some of these
Environmental: The environmental impact of AI is absolutely massive. Far bigger than most people realise. The software used requires real hardware to run on. The energy needed to power that machinery is enormous on its own – the equivalent to hundreds of households’ annual power use. It also produces staggering amounts of CO2, and uses terrifying amounts of water. But all of that feels a bit nebulous, so let’s look at what impact global AI use has in just 1 day. In 24 hours, AI systems are estimated to be responsible for:
- 89,000-218,000 tons of CO2 emissions.
- 45 GWh of electricity (that’s like running a microwave continuously for 475 years).
- 39.16 million gallons of water use (and that’s JUST ChatGPT). Enough to fill 978,000 baths.
Again, that’s PER DAY. And with newer AI models demanding even more resources, there is a very real problem looming on the horizon.
Financial: The word ‘cost’ goes far beyond the cost of a subscription each month. AI is an expensive thing to develop, with things like expensive hardware, constant high energy use and vast amounts of data storage needed to make it all work. If you’re going to integrate AI into your business, then you need to invest both time and money into things like:
- Data preparation and maintenance
- Infrastructure and hardware updates
- Integration with legacy systems
- Training
- Ongoing maintenance and AI model retraining
- Security and compliance
It all adds up!
Ethical Labour: Even though AI seems like it’s all done by computers, there are people behind the scenes. These people are called Cloudworkers and data workers, and it’s their labour that sustains the AI machine. These workers are behind the scenes performing thousands of micro-tasks that make AI not only work, but seem intelligent. These tasks include things like content moderation, image tagging, transcribing audio and flagging hate speech. After all, someone has to teach AI how to work, what’s acceptable and what’s not. These workers are exposed to the worst of what the internet has to offer so that we don’t see it, performing monotonous and emotionally taxing tasks while being vastly underpaid for it. In fact, insights into the pay of Cloudworkers found that they are often recruited out of impoverished populations, and paid as little as $1.46 an hour after tax. Which, if you ask me, is entirely unacceptable.
Mental: This is the one that really gets me. We’re already seeing that the continued use of AI is having an impact on how human beings think. In fact, studies have already shown that excessive or systemic use of AI is contributing to ‘cognitive atrophy’. Which is just as bad as it sounds. Our ability to think critically, creatively or even evaluate information and make decisions is literally withering away. Even our ability to remember things is rapidly declining, especially if you use AI for memory related tasks. This isn’t a debate – it’s a proven fact. Using AI is making us stupider. And while it isn’t happening to everyone who uses AI, it’s happening to enough people that we are already seeing the results. So next time you go to use Chat GPT for something, don’t ask what it can do for you – ask what it’s doing to you.
Reputational: Finally, there’s your reputation to consider, and that’s where the content writing element comes in. Many business owners are using AI to write their content for them, taking a job off their plate and doing a better job than they could. The problem is, unless you invest countless hours into training your AI, and then spend even more time editing whatever it spits out, it’s always going to read like AI. And nowadays, people notice. Not just professional wordy folk like me either. Normal people can tell when something has been written by AI, and most that I speak to avoid reading it. Even if they use AI themselves! Genuine effort and connection is still valued by readers, and it can damage your reputation to just copy and paste your AI results and call it content.
So, after all that, do you still feel the same about AI?
Ultimately I feel that AI does have its place. There are things AI can do that humans simply can’t, or that computers are better equipped to manage. But all of those tasks are ‘back end’ tasks. Data management and process that happen behind the scenes to make sure your business can operate efficiently and has all the information it needs. AI shouldn’t be used for front-end, client-facing work. This kind of use case might seem logical on the surface, but there are so many risks that go along with it that it just isn’t worth it. The front facing work is where human beings shine, and that’s where you can bring the most value to your business.