When a stranger approached me in an airport, the encounter had all the trappings of a scam. I’m embarrassed to say that I accepted the offer anyway.
The person, wearing FIFA gear and some kind of airport badge, approached me as I was walking into the security line. I’m a big fan of the World Cup, and I was traveling out of Houston, one of the host cities for matches. They said that if I shared my email and the name of my favorite team, they would send me a free AI-generated picture of me supporting this team.
Earlier, another friendly person with a similar badge had offered to take my photo next to a festive World Cup display of soccer ball balloons, which I accepted. Wanting to keep the World Cup spirit going, I decided to agree to this AI photo offer, too.
When I later told my family about this experience, my daughter raised an eyebrow and said that I shouldn’t give my image and email to strangers.
She was clearly raised by a smart parent.
I told the airport lady I was rooting for Morocco, whose team had recently advanced in an exciting game out of group play. She was surprised by my choice, but entered my email and picture into the “fan experience” booth. I had a vaguely disconcerting feeling about the whole thing, but I got in the TSA line and forgot about it.
During the flight, I checked my email and made a startling discovery. I received two AI-generated photos of myself in a Moroccan soccer kit kicking a ball inside NRG Stadium in Houston. I don’t wear shorts, so it was oddly amusing to see my glistening AI thighs in these pictures. For laughs, I shared the photos in my family group chat. (My mom also disapproved of the shorts.)
Thankfully, this run-in with AI was not a scam. Airport employees had volunteered to staff various pop-ups designed to welcome travelers during the FIFA World Cup. But the episode did make me wonder about the strange ways AI is infiltrating our lives.
How much electricity and water did it take to make those images that vaguely resembled me with extremely toned soccer-player thighs? Is this part of the explosive growth of artificial intelligence that’s fueling the rise of data centers everywhere?
Major tech companies are racing to build larger, more powerful facilities that can support AI computing. They are hungry for land and electricity. This spring, St. Louis city officials approved a $3 billion Armory Innovation District project, anchored by a massive, 120-megawatt data center in the former Famous-Barr warehouse.
In central Missouri along the I-70 corridor, Google announced a $15 billion data center investment near New Florence in Montgomery County. Amazon has plans for a separate $10 billion campus in Montgomery County.
Meanwhile, there’s an intense backlash to data centers brewing across the country.
The St. Charles City Council voted in May to ban data centers. Data Center Watch, a group that tracks opposition to the facilities, reported that 75 data center projects collectively worth $130 billion were stopped or delayed in the first quarter of this year.
These AI data centers require enormous amounts of power, and utilities across the country are struggling to keep pace. The head of the country’s largest utility recently warned that the nation could face rolling blackouts as soon as 2027 due to the strain that AI is putting on the grid. Consider what’s happening in Henrico County, Virginia, which has 37 operating data centers and more proposed. Officials told county employees and school staff to conserve energy by turning off lights and computers after a nearly 25% increase in electricity rates.
We’re asking schools to turn off lights so that tech giants can keep running AI centers — and building more.
The utility companies need more money to fund new infrastructure to keep up with this skyrocketing demand. Who do you think is going to get stuck with this bill?
It’s not just the people who live near the data centers who are worried about the subsequent rising utility bills, water consumption and environmental impacts. We should all be asking if these data centers even provide enough long-term jobs to justify their massive environmental impact and consumption of public utilities.
My airport run-in reinforced this creeping data center discomfort.
Who wants to pay higher utility rates and lose reliable electricity and water just so that Big Tech billionaires can get even richer? The promise of AI isn’t so rosy for the average person. We get supercharged internet searches and amusing pictures, while AI eliminates millions of jobs, sucks up the water around us, strains the electric grid and raises utility costs.
Seems like a poor tradeoff for AI thighs.
Aisha Sultan is a St. Louis-based journalist who studies parenting in the digital age while trying to keep up with her tech-savvy children. Find her on social media: @AishaS.