AI can seem magical. When you go into any AI platform and ask for anything, just using your finger tips, your answer magically appears in minutes, sometimes seconds.
Maybe you ask for a new work out routine or a generated image of what your dog would look like as a human. But the magic is an illusion. AI is hurting our communities and environments by consuming enormous amounts of water and reducing our mental engagement. And our state is on its way to powering the AI revolution by being on the market for probable AI power plants.
According to the Montana Free Press,”The push for infrastructure to support the technology is also on display in Montana, as data-center developers and energy executives work to capture a piece of a rapidly growing market.” The article, “As AI Investors eye Montana for new data centers, communities brace for water impacts,” says Montana is number three in states that are potential big power plant investors with Northwestern Energy.
The state recently signed with three companies to start what is referred to as the AI data plant project of 2028, the article says, which is the start of building the data centers in Montana. By building them, companies signing with NorthWestern Energy are going to need significant amounts of energy and water to work and cool off the processors and servers, which will cause harm to our clean energy and drinking water, the article says.
This market is growing swiftly, as the article says that all the companies are signing into the project due to the popularity of AI. The companies like NorthWestern Energy are setting the pace for development for this new age of technology and artificial intelligence by setting up these new data plants. All the investors have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to support the new data plants for AI, which will ultimately harm us not only in our brains but in our physical environments, too.
First, the environment has felt the cost of human arrogance with fossil fuel causing our rising sea levels and extreme weather due to the greenhouse gas emissions. Now that arrogance is taking the form of artificial intelligence, using more clean drinking water and carbon emissions that cause warmer tempatures everyday.
Noted by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute in an article, “Data centers and water consumption” by Miguel Yañez-Barnuevo, large AI data centers use five million gallons of water per day. That is the regular water use of a 5,000- 10,000 population town, and that’s not even adding in carbon emissions.
The companies that are involved in this project are saying that “This is the backbone of supporting AI.” But is that truly something that we should be playing into as a community? We need to keep the planet we live in safe from the dangers of carbon emissions that cause warmer temperatures and wasting clean drinking water that is being used to cool down AI data systems.
Second, we are so ignorant to the fact we are in a mass illiteracy crisis in America. According to the National Literacy Institute, 54% of U.S. adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. AI is having this effect that we don’t need to enable our critical thinking skills and putting us at risk for cognitive atrophy by losing brain plasticity.
AI is being normalized given all the readily available, free resources we have like Chat GPT, Gemini, and Sora. It creates this need to be lazier because we have a device that can do it all for us. In a NIH study titled “Impact of AI on human loss in decision making” led by Sayed Ahmad, it states that 68.9% of laziness in humans and 27.7% in the loss of decision-making are due to the impact of artificial intelligence proving that it is the cause of decline in humans critical thinking.
These findings are proof that we are struggling as a society with this tool that is being overused, especially in school and work enviroments. I’ll hear classmates in math or English who use AI say stuff to their friends like, “just use AI, it’s easier,” and, “I just use ChatGPT to write my essays.”
Hearing these things in school can be alarming when we are supposed to be learning and having that privilege of education that not everyone has. This is weakening our cognitive abilities to use critical thinking skills. Why are we asking what can AI do for us when we should be asking what is AI doing to us, to our environment? To our ability to think and make decisions for ourselves?
With moderate use, AI can be a tool. But using it for creative instances like generative art and writing essays is killing our brains. Being creative is how we connect as humans, with music, art, culture, nature. It’s time we help not only ourselves but also the planet we live in. We lose this connection with ourselves by using such ominous resources that we don’t know the long term effects of. Yet here we are, still blindly getting manipulated by it.
This connection we have as humans with each other is a bond that only humans can have. It’s primal, and its detrimental to us as a species. I’ve felt the loss of connection with peers by seeing them use it for school work, and I’ve seen it from teachers as well when they recommend using AI to revise and help instead of utilizing in-person peer or teacher feedback. . These are connections we learn and grow from, yet we are stuck behind the screen that tells us everything. Where will this lead us?
