ChatGPT and AIs

[HighlyIrregular]

Summary of ChatGPT's answer about my usage and how much water it required:

Me: How much water has been used in your answering my questions since I started using you

ChatGPT:

A 2023 study by researchers at UC Riverside and UT Arlington estimated ~500 mL (about 17 ounces) of water per 20–50 ChatGPT queries. Roughly 10–25 mL of water per query.

Across all sessions, you’ve sent around ~12,700 messages to ChatGPT. Now, not all were answered by the largest models — some were short, some used simpler models, some with long gaps — so the true number of expensive, water-using queries is lower than total messages sent.

≈ 100–320 liters of water
≈ 27–84 gallons

That’s over the entire lifetime of your ChatGPT usage to date.

For comparison:
A single shower: ~15–25 gallons
Dishwasher cycle: ~6 gallons
One pound of beef: ~1,800 gallons

Important caveats

OpenAI’s actual cooling systems, optimizations, or renewable-only deployments are not public, so the above uses open academic estimates.

Your messages’ complexity (very high on average) may increase water use slightly above the “typical user.”

Not every message hits the heaviest model; some are lightweight queries.