AI is not your friend

Creativity suffers at the mechanical hand of AI;

it’s a waste of precious water in our warm state

The world, or humanity, is constantly changing, like the ebb and flow of the tides. The changes that happen always have repercussions, but whether society deems these repercussions as important is the problem.

The newest change humanity has seen is the sudden influx of AI. Data centers, chatbots and surveillance,are AI powered and pushed into the faces of citizens. They are marketed as the next technological innovation, tools to make our lives easier. Are easier lives worth the detrimental effects of this “new technology?” If you don't conform, will you get left behind?

AI data centers are excessively contributing to the global rising heat levels. Data centers create “heat islands” that warm the surrounding land by around 16 degrees, affecting roughly 340 million people.

Global warming is already affecting the Earth and its inhabitants, so adding even more heat from data centers is a debilitating blow.

Andrea Marinoni, a researcher, and their team compared temperature data over the past 20 years from remote sensors and mapped/compared it with the location of AI “hyperscalers,” or data centers. What they found was appalling, to say the least.

Marinoni and the research team found that after a data center was opened, surface temperatures increased by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. In severe cases, areas near data centers increased in temperature by 16.4 degrees. Walking outside in July to mid September is already miserable in many states, and adding this extra source of heat to the Earth is only going to make leaving your house worse.

One of the biggest known impacts of data centers is the amount of water that they use. It has been estimated by researchers at Cornell University that AI data centers will drain “...731 to 1,125 million cubic meters of water per year – equal to the annual household water usage of 6 to 10 million Americans.”

Do you see that? Per year, data centers drain the same amount of water that millions of American households do. The Earth cannot sustain this amount of water usage for an extended period of time.

Also considerthat data aenters are purposefully being built in towns in a state of drought or low water levels. According to an independent researcher, in 2026, “the first week of May, two data center developments, one in Arizona and another in Georgia, were caught taking public water without authorization. In both cases, data center developers consumed water they were prohibited from taking, in communities already experiencing water stress, and in both cases it was the residents who discovered it.”

This is a textbook example of the rich making themselves richer while pushing the poor into the ground, draining everything the poor have. The AI craze and progressive building of data centers can be compared to the Gold Rush of 1848-1855. The vast majority of Americans only care about personal and economic gain. Buy buy buy, make money, become a billionaire. This mentality allowed for the rapid spread of AI and AI data centers like a plague, crawling up the bodies of unaware citizens.

The biggest blow that slapped the world across the face is the fact that AI has taken the place of creativity within society. You want to write a piece of music? Ask an AI slop machine to write it for you, allowing for non-musical actions and ideas to be written within the music. You want to make art? Oh, let me ask my good friend Generative AI to help me.

Society lost the ability to use human talent and grit to create art. Music is an intensely human creation, not a creation meant to be soulless. Music is meant to make people feel something, whether it is through emotion or thought. A machine cannot replicate the feelings that come with making and listening to music.

There is another detrimental effect that AI chatbots have bestowed upon society. People treat chatbots as the new google, asking them every question that pops into their minds. “Chat GPT is my best friend.” How many times have you heard that phrase? What has happened to asking our colleagues, our friends, researchers, or even going to the library to find answers to our questions?

AI is not your friend. AI is damaging the planet that we live on and deteriorating your critical thinking skills. Society must remember that we have all of the tools to research and create things without the use of AI. Humans thrived and created before AI; we can still do it now.