As artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into everyday life, concerns are rightly growing about its environmental and social impacts. One user-led proposal suggests that tools like ChatGPT should display or report the estimated environmental footprint of user queries—such as electricity used, water consumed, or carbon emitted per interaction.
🌱 The Original Suggestion
The proposal was simple: display a sustainability footprint (e.g. energy, water, carbon) per prompt or session. This could help users understand and reduce their digital environmental impact, just like nutrition labels or energy ratings on appliances.
Instead of showing complex data with every response, the suggestion included a practical version—a weekly or monthly summary sent via email or available in the user dashboard, using a scaled rating such as:
- 🌱 Minimal
- 🌿 Low
- 🌳 Moderate
- 🔥 High
This approach balances awareness with usability, and encourages more responsible AI usage without overwhelming the user with technical data.
⚙️ Could It Actually Be Implemented?
Technically, yes—AI platforms already collect usage data such as compute time, token counts, and model types. These can be mapped to energy and emissions estimates using existing tools like CodeCarbon or carbon intensity APIs.
Challenges include:
- Lack of standard metrics for per-query water and carbon usage
- Variable infrastructure and model loads
- Potential performance overhead in calculating or displaying this data in real time
Despite this, a simplified system using ranges or averages could still be a meaningful step forward.
📬 How Can Users Submit This to OpenAI?
You can raise this directly with OpenAI through:
- OpenAI Help Chat at https://help.openai.com/
- Click the chat icon
- Select “ChatGPT” → “Other” → “Leave a message”
- Paste your feedback or feature suggestion
- OpenAI Community Forum: https://community.openai.com/
- Create a new topic under ChatGPT → Feedback
- Use a clear title e.g. “Feature Request: AI Environmental Impact Summary”
📣 Where Else Can This Be Shared?
To gain traction and encourage companies to adopt transparency features like this, consider using the following methods:
🗳️ Create a Poll or Survey
- SurveyMonkey or Typeform to run public opinion polls
- Reddit (e.g. r/Futurology or r/ChatGPT) for discussion and voting
- Twitter/X polls to gauge support
- LinkedIn to engage professionals in the tech and ESG space
🌐 Raise the Issue on Public Platforms
- Write blog posts (like this one) or Medium articles
- Submit the idea to forums such as Product Hunt
- Discuss it on Stack Overflow, GitHub Discussions, or AI/ML mailing lists
- Engage with AI ethics groups such as Partnership on AI
📍 Conclusion
Adding an environmental impact summary to AI platforms like ChatGPT would be a small but significant step toward transparent, responsible technology use. While not without its challenges, this idea is technically feasible and could be opt-in to avoid overloading users.
The more users who raise awareness, the more likely it is that companies like OpenAI will adopt these features in future updates. If you’re concerned about climate impact, data centre usage, or AI sustainability, consider sharing this suggestion and joining the discussion.
Want to suggest this feature to OpenAI? Visit help.openai.com and leave your message today.