“I need help getting into shape. Can I use AI as a personal trainer?”
—Sweat Breaker
Dear Sweat,
Nope. The most popular AI tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, can’t actually help you trim down that waistline or make your pecs look plump. Sure, Claude can draft a decent nutrition plan, and ChatGPT can tell you which dumbbell exercises to start with, but basic Google searches could already do that a decade ago. Yet here we both are, in worse shape than we’d like.
I have been getting a bit fat myself; I’m in my thirties and still gorge on food as though I have a teenager’s metabolism. Far too often, I stress eat Taco Bell in the WIRED break room before taking a luxurious, carb-induced power nap. It’s an embarrassingly bad habit, and no amount of annoying AI-powered notifications reminding me to eat right or personally generated workout tips will snap me out of these unhealthy patterns. The responsibility to make holistic lifestyle changes and improve my health falls solely on me. I’m the only one who inhabits this body and the only one who has the power to change it.
Thinking about bodies and betterment, the fact you have an organic life-form at all—a bag of bones you can move around in and use to process the world—sets your existence far apart from these faceless, GPU-powered bots whose only physical form is distributed across the labyrinthine hallways of a data center. Even if bots can make solid suggestions for exercises based on the statistical average of everything posted online, an algorithm doesn’t have any firsthand knowledge about a human’s physical limits. It has never gotten disgustingly sweaty on the treadmill, or powered through a workout a little too hungover, or achieved new performance records by overcoming the fatigue.
You know who likely has? The personal trainer at your local gym. If you have the budget, book at least a couple of sessions right now. A trainer can give you some exercises to do, watch your form, and offer guidance so you can complete the movements in a way that’s safer and more efficient. Even expensive exercise gadgets—with computer vision tools that can police your breathing and count your reps—won’t achieve the same level of motivating social pressure as paying an athletic human to monitor your workout in a room full of other athletic humans.
“I use AI even though I know it’s terrible for the environment. Is there anything I can do to limit the impact?”
—Powered Down
Dear Powered,
I can tell this question comes from an honest place of wanting to reduce the harm you cause through your individual interactions with AI software, which we know is quite resource-intensive. But first, take a step back with me for a moment and free yourself from the guilt of existence.
I would bet serious cash you’re an avid recycler as well? Someone who knows far too much about the different types of plastics and religiously sorts it all out like an upstanding citizen?
While this is a great practice in theory, your recyclable items may actually end up getting incinerated, buried in a landfill, or tossed into the ocean. This is because waste-management sites can’t process many types of plastic, and the deluge of garbage our society generates is just too overwhelming for our current systems to deal with. So, in the case of plastic recycling, our intentions as consumers are righteous, but the actions we take often amount to little more than a daily ritual absolving ourselves of the guilt of participating in a system that contributes to pollution.
It may feel good right now to personally opt out from using energy-intensive generative AI software when you can. Even so, you may not be able to avoid it forever. Your future job could be augmented by AI in some way that’s deemed critical to your performance, and you’ll have no choice but to let it suck up power and resources so you can get your work done. Honestly, the last decade’s shift to cloud storage has intensively transformed how we approach computing as a society, and I don’t know anyone who’s ethically conflicted about the number of photos clogging up their Apple iCloud storage. The reality is that personal, consumer decisions have less of an impact on the world than we would often like to think.
Even though I’m skeptical that abstention from AI tools by individual users will have a significant impact on the environment, this doesn’t mean the future is hopeless! If anything, I think you should be calling up your government representatives and voicing your perspective as someone who uses AI and is concerned with the technology’s impact on the long-term health of our planet. Assuming tech companies are going to continue building giant data centers—and they are—we should at least push for sustainable infrastructure, like onsite renewable energy generation and a reduction of water consumption by the computers’ cooling systems. The public deserves more transparency about how vast amounts of resources are consumed at these private sites that power our AI tools.
At your service,
Reece
Seeking advice on how to navigate the world of artificial intelligence tools? Submit any questions you’d like Reece Rogers to answer to mail@wired.com, and use the subject line The Prompt.
