Buddhist Ethics and AI: Right Livelihood

I sent this report to the Buddhism & AI Initiative at engagedbuddhism.ai to contribute to their discussion about the impact of AI on our lives and ecosystems, and debate how Buddhists should respond to these impacts. I discuss the environmental impacts, the unauthorized use of human creativity, impacts on our work and social lives. I have not even discussed the political implications of AI, which will come in a later report.

Buddhist Ethical Practice and AI

In sum, large scale AI use degrades the viability of life for humans, animals and the whole ecosystem, degrades human work and creativity, and degrades the quality of life in our communities. 

As Buddhists who practice Buddhist Ethics, we should not be promoting the use of AI for our Buddhist practice, or any other Buddhist endeavor. 

1. Right Livelihood. The environmental costs and damage caused by AI are extremely high. 

Data Centers use exorbitant amounts of water and electricity. The electricity required by data centers requires burning dangerous amounts of fossil fuels, and makes electricity more expensive for households and businesses on the same grid.

Environmental and Energy Study Institute

Highights: EESI Data Center Resources (January 26, 2026)

AI Data Centers and Electricity Use:

Data centers could represent up to 12% of total U.S. electricity demand by 2028—up to 580 terawatt-hours per year. 

Some utilities are moving to extend the life of coal power plants. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has taken steps to facilitate or even encourage such developments.

We had pproximately 500 GW of natural gas capacity in the United States in 2022, spread across 2,000 gas-fired plants that emitted 659 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide. 

If utilities add 100 GW of new gas facilities for data centers, it could potentially result in more than 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually as well as other harmful pollution. 

This would continue to harm the environment and compromise the health of people living near these new power plants. 

AI Data Centers and Water Use:

Environmental and Energy Study Institute

Highlights: EESI Data Center Resources

Data center developers are increasingly tapping into freshwater resources to quench the thirst of data centers, which is putting nearby communities at risk.

Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.

With larger and new AI-focused data centers, water consumption is increasing alongside energy usage and carbon emissions.

Novel technologies like direct-to-chip cooling and immersion cooling can reduce water and energy usage by data centers.

Data centers have a thirst for water, and their rapid expansion threatens freshwater supplies. Only 3% of Earth’s water is freshwater, and only 0.5% of all water is accessible and safe for human consumption. 

Increasing drought and water shortages are reducing water availability. Meanwhile, data center developers are increasingly tapping into surface and underground aquifers to cool their facilities.

Data center water usage closely parallels energy usage and carbon emissions. As data centers use more energy for their typical data center operations and to meet AI requests, they consume larger amounts of water to cool their processor chips, so as to avoid overheating and potential damage. 

Similarly, as energy use increases in data centers, so do carbon emissions.

A medium-sized data center can consume up to roughly 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling purposes, equivalent to the annual water usage of approximately 1,000 households. Larger data centers can each “drink” up to 5 million gallons per day, or about 1.8 billion annually, usage equivalent to a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. 

Together, the nation’s 5,426 data centers consume billions of gallons of water annually. One report estimated that U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021). 

A 2016 report found that fewer than one-third of data center operators track water consumption.Water consumption is expected to continue increasing as data centers grow in number, size, and complexity.

According to scientists at the University of California, Riverside, each 100-word AI prompt is estimated to use roughly one bottle of water (or 519 milliliters). This may not sound like much, but billions of AI users worldwide enter prompts into systems like ChatGPT every minute. Large language models require many energy-intensive calculations, necessitating liquid cooling systems.

https://www.eesi.org/data-center-impacts

A recent Politico report (5/26) showed that QTS, a hyperscaled data center in Fayetteville GA, used 30 million gallons of county water that went unaccounted for and unpaid until local residents started complaining about low water pressure. Residents were told by city councilors to cut back their household consumption of water use.

Land waste: Data Centers take up land that could be used for farming, for wild growth and animal habitat, for water absorption and filtering for ground water replenishment, for affordable housing and facilities necessary for a decent human life

Noise and air pollution: people who live around hyperscaled data centers report excessive and disturbing levels of industrial noise. 

Emissions from data centers and the power plants that fuel them contributes to local air pollution and global warming.

2.   Right Livelihood. AI models steal from human creators without permission or compensation.

Human beings are the unpaid labor of AI training and modeling. AI modelers use the creative work of human beings to train their AI models; music, film and video, writing, and online conversations are used by AI modelers without our knowledge, permission or compensation. The AI modelers are stealing from us and our fellow humans. It is unethical to allow them to continue to steal our creative works and conversations. 

Besides stealing our creative works, AI modelers are producing so much fake AI content, they are crowding out and displacing online space for human-created work. This makes human-made content harder to find, and more expensive to host on the web.

AI counterfeits are deluding people with fake content that are not based on fact that skews their social and political views and choices. AI counterfeits are being used to generate illegal pornography and degrading depictions that exploit human beings without their knowledge or consent.

3.   Right Livelihood. AI models degrade and devalue the work of human employees, and are designed to replace workers with data machines.

We are the precariat, and our jobs, precarious as they are already, are being further diminished by the threat of AI replacement. Corporations are using the threat of AI replacement to lay off thousands of workers and reduce their pay. Managers are forcing workers to use AI tools that don’t assist them with their work, often degrade the quality of their work and generate more “clean up” work to fix what AI has broken. 

In sum, large scale AI use degrades the viability of life for humans, animals and the whole ecosystem, degrades human work and creativity, and degrades the quality of life in our communities. 

As Buddhists who practice Buddhist Ethics, we should not be promoting the use of AI for our Buddhist practice, or any other Buddhist endeavor.