An Instagram post that pins the wildfires ravaging southern California on AI’s wasteful energy usage is going viral.
The post, created by activist Matt Bernstein, has been liked by more than 328,000 people and shared more than 120,000 times in the less than 24 hours since it was first published.
Text overlayed across two images of raging fires states: “somewhere, the men who build AI chatbots are selecting the interiors for the rocketships they will use to leave earth and all of us burning with it. somewhere, the billionaire oil CEOs are making plans to buy apocalypse bunkers in new zealand.”
Bernstein then explicitly linked the fires to President-elect Donald Trump’s orbit of influence, continuing: “somewhere, these men are meeting with members of trump’s cabinet, promising them campaign donations in exchange for the rejection of any climate legislation. somewhere, those politicians are getting ready for a television interview where they will tell you none of this is real, because to admit it’s happening is to admit their role in it.”
The post then shifts gears to target artificial intelligence programs, such as ChatGPT.
“one search on chatGPT uses 10x the amount of energy as a google search,” the post stated, referencing a statistic cited in a Goldman Sachs report (though other estimates have put the energy difference at as high as 25 times more).
“training one AI model produces the same amount of carbon dioxide as 300 round trip flights between new york and san francisco and five times the lifetime emissions of a car,” it continued. “we don’t need AI ‘art,’ we don’t need AI grocery lists. we don’t need AI self-driving cars. we don’t need chatGPT or gemini or grok or dall-E or whatever ‘revolutionary’ technology already exists inside our own human brains. we need the earth.”
A UN report this year warned about the drastic impact of AI on the environment, noting it may consume six times more water than the nation of Denmark, at a time when California is suffering a severe drought.
The post comes as wildfires enveloping the Los Angeles area continue to burn unabated, encompassing more than 29,000 acres, according to CalFIRE. At least five people have been killed and more than 100,000 people were evacuated from their homes.
According to reverse image searches, the second image in the post was taken by Los Angeles-based photographer Kyle Grillot for Bloomberg and shows firefighters tackling the Pacific Palisades fire.
The first image, however, shows the Park fire from July 2024 burning along Highway 32 in Northern California’s Butte County. That image was taken by Noah Berger for the Associated Press.
Bernstein’s post has garnered more than 2,800 comments—largely supportive of its message—with dozens of users echoing the tenets of the post.
“The revolution is now. The revolution is not tomorrow,” states one comment that has been liked more than 5,000 times.
“This will never end until we end capitalism,” reads another comment.
“I have never used chat gpt or any AI and never will,” wrote someone else.
“most of the AI ‘solutions’ are being forced on us in the silliest of formats and ways while all it’s doing is DESTROYING THE PLANET,” echoed another commenter.
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