Creating an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your smartphone, according to researchers.

Using a tool called Code Carbon, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Hugging Face compared consumption and emission data across 16 of the most popular models found on HuggingFace Hub.

The researchers discovered that general purpose AI models mostly consume much more energy than single purpose models. The researchers also found that text-based AI tasks are more energy-efficient than those involving images.

The findings were seen to highlight the high energy consumption demands of generative AI systems and particularly text-to-image models. 

It also underscored the need for generative AI developers to be more transparent about the environmental impacts of their technologies.