Sam Altman recently tweeted that OpenAI might be spending tens of millions of dollars on electricity… just to process polite messages like please and thank you in ChatGPT.
That got me thinking.
What’s the environmental cost of kindness in the age of AI?
I dug a little deeper to get some rough numbers.
As of May 2025, major AI platforms—ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity and Claude serve around 250 million users daily.
Let’s say every third user throws in five polite words a day.
That’s over 600 billion polite tokens per month.
Now for the CO₂ side of things…
Here’s how it adds up:
- Total polite words per day
83.3M users × 5 words = 416.7 million words/day - Convert to bytes
416.7M × 5 bytes = 2.08 billion bytes = ~2.08 GB/day - Energy used
2.08 GB × 5 kWh/GB = 10.4 kWh/day - CO₂ emissions
10.4 kWh × 0.4 kg CO₂ = ~4.16 kg CO₂/day
Annual Impact:
4.16 kg/day × 365 = ~1,518 kg CO₂/year
= ~1.5 metric tons CO₂/year
🌳 Tree Planting Equivalent ≈ 68 trees/year
That’s not huge. But it’s real.
Kindness costs carbon 🤔
