There’s a justified horror many people feel about the environmental impact entailed every time someone shares a prompt with a language model. While I’d be lying if I said I fully share that feeling, I experience something similar when I see pointless uses of image and video models. I’ve largely stopped making AI-generated images for this reason. I almost never have a real need to do it, unlike the other ways I use LLMs. I can understand that what I feel about these uses mirrors what others feel about all, or nearly all, uses of LLMs.
Why, then, do we so rarely see a platform like TikTok discussed in these terms? As a commuter whose brain is wired in a way that public-transport cacophony can be mildly agonising, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. The soundscape I find most difficult is when multiple people are absently flicking through short-form videos without ever watching one in full: each playing a couple of seconds from a whole sequence of clips, creating a disordered, overlapping noise on all sides. At this point, I find it almost impossible to tune out.
One estimate suggests that TikTok’s annual carbon footprint may already exceed that of Greece. Mobile video is intrinsically energy-intensive, and the platform’s design encourages distracted browsing. For most users, it’s also a profoundly passive space: they consume rather than create, often in ways that feel distracted and subjectively unsatisfying. There’s something increasingly grotesque about this: a sense of people hypnotised by an object that simultaneously erodes their capacity to focus. It feels almost like a cruel joke: a self-fragmenting obsession.
What strikes me as odd is that we feel so little moral unease about TikTok on these grounds, while generative AI attracts so much: and, for the most part, rightly so. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not suggesting either/or, but both/and. Our analysis of the environmental impact of digital activity needs to encompass the whole platform landscape, and it needs to recognise the link between distracted engagement and (environmentally) wasteful use.
