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You might be trying to protect your future self from harm when the eventual robot uprising strikes, yet using pleasantries like 'please' and 'thank you' in your messages to ChatGPT actually has an alarmingly high environmental cost, indicating that you should be a bit less polite during your next conversations.
It can be hard to shed your typical conversational habits when talking with an AI chatbot – especially as they're only becoming more 'human' with each new model – but keeping your chats as brief and concise as possible is essential when it comes to downplaying the impact that the tech has on the climate.
Sam Altman previously noted that people's use of pleasantries in conversation with ChatGPT was an expensive yet beneficial cost for OpenAI, but you might be shocked to discover that saying something as simple as 'you're welcome' to the tool can use around 50 ml of water.
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This estimation comes from Nesibe Kırış Can's newsletter 'techletter', where she reveals that a 100-word message to an AI chatbot can consume over 1.4 liters of water, so imagine that multiplied across the hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users.
It's likely that this figure – estimated in April 2025 – has only grown as AI demand has increased, with a new report from the United Nations University outlining the immense pressure that growing AI usage across the world is putting on the environment.
Data centers, across the entirety of last year, consumed roughly 9.3 trillion liters (2.5 billion gallons) of water — and while this doesn't all comes as a result of AI usage, with current estimates sitting at 'only' 20 per cent, it is enough to provide drinking water for everyone on the planet for a year and a half.
Cutting down on both the amount of pleasantries that you use in your messages, and the length of the responses you receive from the chatbots themselves can significantly reduce the burden that your usage places on electrical and water demands.
There is no functional benefit to saying 'please' and 'thank you' anymore either, as any internal systems that rewarded politeness in the past have been removed, ensuring that you get the desired result no matter how blunt your communications might be.
Some people even recommend keeping your requests to the point, as cutting out any additional or redundant information in your messages can help provide tools like ChatGPT a focus that it can't stray from.
