ChatGPT isnt responsible for the Los Angeles fires, but it does use a crazy amount of water

As the Los Angeles fires rage on, displacing nearly 180,000 people and destroying over 9,000 buildings, many social media users have pointed the blame at an unusual target: ChatGPT. ChatGPT and other AI models have a massive carbon footprint, which contributes to climate change. Climate change is responsible for drier conditions and warming temperatures, which in turn creates the perfect environment for wildfires to spark and spread when picked up by strong winds. SEE ALSO: Los Angeles wildfires' destruction shown in satellite images So in a way, ChatGPT is part of the problem by contributing to climate change. But no, ChatGPT didn't start the fire, and it's not the reason why the city ran out of water. Tweet may have been deleted Martin Adams, former general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power told the Los Angeles Times, "The [water] system has never been designed to fight a wildfire that then envelops a community." Firefighters ran out of water because the system wasn't built to pump out that much water over a sustained period of time, not because it was misappropriated by data centers. The online conversation connecting ChatGPT to the LA wildfires was never meant literally accuse AI models of starting fires. Instead, it has tied real-time relevancy to an growing issue which is AI's impact on the environment. "We don't need AI 'art.' We don't need AI grocery lists. We don't need AI self-driving cars. We don't need ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok or DALL-E or whatever 'revolutionary' technology already exists inside our own human brains. We need the earth," wrote makeup artist and activist Matt Bernstein in an Instagram post that has gained almost 500,000 likes. So, just how much water does ChatGPT use? Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are evasive about their energy usage. But water consumption can be accessed through public records and estimated through calculations by researchers. A 2023 investigation from the Associated Press disc