Writing a 100-word email using ChatGPT consumes approximately 519 millilitres of water - the equivalent to just over a standard bottle of mineral water - according to researchers.

A study on how much water and power OpenAI’s ChatGPT, using the GPT-4 language model, consumes to write the average 100-word email conducted by The Washington Post in collaboration with the University of California, Riverside, found that every 100-word email generated by the system requires 519 millilitres of water for cooling.

If one in ten working Americans (approximately 16 million people) uses ChatGPT weekly to send a single email, the total annual water consumption would reach around 435 million litres. This amount is roughly equivalent to the daily water usage of Rhode Island, USA, for one and a half days.

The researchers also calculated that the energy consumption for sending one email is about 0.14 kilowatt-hours (kWh), which is comparable to powering 14 LED bulbs for one hour.

The findings are seen to raise serious environmental concerns. The high demand for water can  divert water away from local families and exacerbate drought conditions, particularly in arid regions, for example.

Earlier, the same researchers had calculated that training the GPT-3 large language model model alone consumed about 700,000 litres of water, further underscoring the resource-intensive nature of AI technologies.