A new ’80s’ trend based on artificial intelligence (AI) has caught the attention of users on social media platform Instagram these days.

Users have turned social media feeds into old-fashioned photo albums, but the increasingly popular trend has raised concerns about the environmental impact of AI-generated images.

It may only take a few seconds to generate an image with AI, but the process requires large amounts of energy-consuming data centers, water-based cooling systems and resource-intensive hardware.

According to a study by Carnegie Mellon University and Hugging Face, generating an AI image can consume 0.01 to 0.29 kilowatts of electricity.

This amount may seem trivial, but when millions of users create multiple versions of the same image, the overall environmental impact becomes significant.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that electricity demand from data centers worldwide could more than double by 2030, largely due to the increasing use of AI.

Data centers also require large amounts of water to keep servers from overheating, he says.

Researchers at the University of California Riverside estimate that about 700,000 liters of fresh water was used to train GPT-3.

Environmental costs are not limited to the use of AI, but also extend to the manufacture of GPUs and other hardware, processes that include mining, manufacturing of semiconductors and the use of key minerals.

The issue is not necessarily to abandon AI, but to use it more responsibly and thoughtfully.

Creating an image may seem harmless, but the repeated use of AI tools for short-term social media trends can increase the impact of this technology on the overall ecosystem.