The Copy-Paste Morality: Who is Actually Doing the Thinking for You?
Let’s be completely honest for a second, because I am tired of the pretense.
Lately, my timeline has been flooded with this deeply righteous, high-horse critique about the "morality" of AI. The biggest one people love to throw around right now is the environmental angle. People get on TikTok or Twitter completely losing their minds over how much water AI data centers consume, yelling about saving the drinking water and demanding people stop using the technology entirely.
It sounds super noble. It makes for a great infographic. But it is completely brainless, and I am not writing this to give myself a bulletproof justification or create some false pretense to excuse my own daily workflow. I’ve genuinely integrated tools like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT into my creative process, specifically using features in Photoshop and Lightroom to get a better visual grasp on campaign directions. But before I even talk about the creative side, let's look at the actual research, because the numbers immediately expose the absolute hypocrisy of modern internet morality.
The University of California Riverside has been tracking data center water footprints. If you take the absolute highest estimates for what a single AI interaction uses, running about fifty prompts a day for an entire year consumes the same amount of water as a couple of quarter-pound beef patties. One single hamburger patty takes about 450 gallons of water to produce because of the massive agricultural supply chain. If you skip one single burger this month, you have literally pre-paid the water footprint for millions of AI chatbot replies.
Even deeper than that, people completely ignore how the energy grid works. Turning on your AC, blasting your heat, keeping studio lights on, or charging your devices all draws from an electric grid that relies on boiling and evaporating trillions of gallons of water a year just to cool down power plants. The power grid is a water monster. But because that water is evaporating three counties away at a power plant instead of at a tech company's data center, people don't see it. And because they don't see it, they don't care. They will sit in a frozen AC room, eating a burger, scrolling on a phone plugged into a fossil-fuel grid, and type out a paragraph condemning AI for wasting water.
What even are we talking about at this point?
This isn’t actually about the water. This is about a much bigger disease in our culture right now. We are a generation that has completely lost its sense of objective morality. People try to uphold a standard that they cannot cook up in their own daily lives. It is so easy for people to hop on social media and flag-wave about how good of a person they are, but behind closed doors, the reality is completely different. It is all just virtue signaling. Everything has been flattened into this mindless, team-based "good versus bad" simulation.
We are letting complete strangers on the internet think for us. We have people going to college for four years who still do not know how to form an independent thought, how to write down their own perspective, or how to challenge the group. You see it in friend groups constantly. A friend can be entirely, objectively wrong, but the group will still root for them and defend them because there is zero accountability. Just a straight-up flock of birds moving in whatever direction the wind blows. Nobody has a mind of their own anymore.
The double standards are genuinely crazy. Look at how society treats someone like Chris Brown. The man is a documented, toxic, violent human being. He beats women, his track record is out there for everyone to see, and it is terrible. Yet he still sells out arenas. People still drop thousands of dollars on his music, buy tickets, and pay for VIP meet-and-greets. The internet will collectively say "separate the art from the artist" for a celebrity with money and fame. But the exact same people will find some random, nameless person online who commits an act of assault, and they will completely destroy his life, condemn him, and demand he be locked away forever.
Where is the actual standard? How can you yell "fuck Donald Trump" and talk about dismantling corrupt systems while simultaneously funding and entertaining people who do horrible things just because they make a catchy song? The societal standard of what is right or wrong is completely broken. We elected a literal rapist to the highest office in the country, so please stop lecturing me about what is "ludicrous" or "immoral." The bar is in hell.
When you strip away the performative outrage, you realize the internet completely blinds people to the actual nuance of how technology is integrating with humanity. Nobody is cheering for people to get replaced or put out of their jobs—that is a completely different, valid anxiety. The real story is how AI is actively integrating with human expertise to solve massive problems.
Look at medicine: oncology platforms are now hitting 94% accuracy rates in pathology labs, catching tumors and cancers weeks or months earlier than standard manual human screening alone. Look at fields like architecture, where designers are using generative BIM tools to run structural, daylighting, and energy-efficiency simulations in minutes instead of weeks, building safer and cleaner spaces. In the creative field, it helps us map out complex campaigns, streamline heavy technical workflows, and push concepts further.
It isn't a black-and-white comic book where AI is just an environmental villain or a job-stealer. It is a deeply integrated tool that is reshaping medicine, science, and design. But looking at that nuance requires you to actually read, research, and think. It’s way easier to just copy and paste a trendy complaint on the timeline so you can feel like an eco-warrior for the day.
As individuals, we desperately need to start recognizing when something is actually wrong and when something is right based on facts, not based on what the algorithm told us to feel today. We need to have our own minds and speak for ourselves instead of letting a bunch of performative internet strangers define our ethics.
AI has a footprint, just like the car you drive does, just like the clothes we buy do, just like the food we eat does. If you want to have a real, nuanced conversation about infrastructure and ethics, let's have it. I am all ears. But stop letting the internet do your thinking for you. Step outside, look at the actual numbers, and figure out your own code before you start judging everyone else's.
