The Department of Energy Wants You to Know Your Conservation Efforts Are Making a Difference

We here at the Department of Energy wanted to thank you for being conscientious about your energy usage this summer. Your efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. As a token of our gratitude, we wanted to highlight all the small but powerful steps you’ve taken to conserve energy over the past few months—and how that energy has instead been used to fuel the insatiable beast that is AI.

• By turning off your lights all day every day for a month, you conserved about 1 percent of the energy needed for AI to generate a picture of a duck wearing sunglasses. Isn’t he cute? Aside from the fact that he has the feet of a human man, of course.
• By handwashing your dishes instead of using your dishwasher, you made it possible for an elaborate, four-story digital billboard in Times Square to advertise a seven-dollar bottle of water for twelve seconds. The display runs 24-7, naturally, but you personally contributed twelve seconds of that. You are making a difference!
• By not showering for two whole weeks, you enabled an AI Facebook bot to create and post several images of Jesus eating breakfast at a Denny’s, which ultimately convinced 837,000 people that Christ had returned to Earth. Did you notice his legs are two dolphin tails? You’re the only one who did.
• An AI-generated bot account was able to comment “PUSSY IN BIO” on 2.1 million Instagram posts, all thanks to you switching from AC to a big box fan that just kind of pushes the stale, hot air in your apartment around. We’re building a better world—together.
• By switching all the lightbulbs in your house to LED, you saved enough energy for a self-driving car to make an unprotected lefthand turn across three lanes of traffic.
• With the energy you conserved by scrapping your refrigerator entirely, a bored twenty-something was able to use an AI TikTok filter to see what they would’ve looked like in the 1970s. Spoiler alert: it’s exactly the same but in ’70s clothes.
• By dropping $7K on better, energy-efficient insulation for your home, Google AI was able to tell someone how to prepare chicken incorrectly, and they got, like, super sick—thanks to you!
• Hang-drying your clothes instead of using your dryer provided enough energy for one AI bot to get really good at online chess.
• Waking up at 4 a.m. to do your laundry conserved a ton of energy—energy that was used by ChatGPT to help a seventh grader plagiarize his entire essay on George Orwell’s 1984. Who needs to read a book on technology, totalitarianism, and propaganda, anyway?
• By unplugging all of your appliances, you freed up the exact amount of energy needed to create an AI-generated video of Adele’s “Hello” being sung by Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants. Keep them unplugged for the rest of the summer, and you might get Mr. Krabs’s cover of “Pink Pony Club.”

We know you adopted energy-saving practices to help conserve our planet’s resources and bring down our collective carbon footprint, but what you ultimately accomplished is just as important: helping AI do something menial and stupid. We hope seeing how much energy AI needlessly and uninhibitedly consumes inspires you to continue implementing practices that make your life incrementally more difficult during the hottest months of the year. We need you. Seriously, we really want that “Pink Pony Club” cover.