Stop worrying about your AI footprint. Look at the big picture instead.

As with climate change, we need to look at it as a system rather than a series of individual decisions.

Large tech companies that use AI in their products must disclose their overall energy and water consumption, as well as detail how they perform their calculations. Measuring the load per request is a start, but we also deserve to see how these impacts add up across billions of users and how that changes over time as companies (hopefully) make their products more efficient. Lawmakers should demand such disclosure, and we should ask for it too.

This doesn't mean there is absolutely no individual action you can take. Just as you can significantly reduce your individual greenhouse gas emissions by flying less and eating less meat, there are some smart things you can do to reduce the impact of AI. Creating videos tends to be particularly energy-intensive, as is using reasoning models to complete long prompts and produce long answers. Asking a chatbot to help you plan your day, suggest fun activities for the whole family, or summarize a ridiculously long email has relatively little impact.

Ultimately, as long as you're not producing non-stop AI garbage, you shouldn't worry too much about your individual AI footprint. But we all need to keep an eye on what this industry will mean for our network, our society and our planet.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology ReviewWeekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, register here.