OpenAI chief Sam Altman has been branded ‘sickeningly evil’ and ‘anti-human’ following remarks that appeared to compare the energy consumption of AI with the resources required to ‘grow’ a person.

The ChatGPT boss was attempting to counter accusations that each query consumes staggering amounts of water, dismissing the criticism as “totally fake” and arguing that people overlook the energy humans themselves consume.

Yet by drawing parallels between AI and people, Altman has faced fierce backlash online, with one technologist stating we “do not want to see a world where we equate a piece of technology to a human being”.

“Don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for each query or whatever,” he said, before rejecting it entirely. “This is completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality.”

During an event hosted by The Indian Express as part of a major AI summit, Altman stated: “Don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for each query or whatever. This is completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality.”

He explained that older data centres relied on evaporative cooling – a water-intensive system – but maintained that’s no longer the situation for OpenAI. Nevertheless, he acknowledged there’s a genuine concern.

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Altman said: “It’s fair to be concerned about the energy consumption – not per query, but in total, because the world is now using so much AI. The world needs to move towards nuclear, wind, and solar very quickly.”

Currently, there’s no legal obligation for technology companies to publicly reveal precisely how much energy and water they consume – a contentious issue for scientists attempting to monitor the real-world impact of the AI revolution.

Critics caution that concentrating massive server farms can put pressure on local power networks and, in some cases, lead to higher electricity costs.

Altman disputed a suggestion that a single ChatGPT query could consume the equivalent of 1.5 iPhone battery charges, saying: “There’s no way it’s anything close to that much.”

He maintained that the entire discussion is frequently presented unfairly – concentrating on the energy required to train an AI model, then contrasting that with the minimal cost of a human completing one task.

“It also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman remarked. “It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.

“And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you. AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis.”

Scientist Sridhar Vembu took to X to share his thoughts: “I do not want to see a world where we equate a piece of technology to a human being. I work hard as a technologist to see a world where we don’t allow technology to dominate our lives; instead, it should quietly recede into the background.”

The remarks sparked fierce debate on Reddit, where one user fumed: “It really is one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen a techbro say. Like, he literally doesn’t seem to understand that human life has value beyond whatever cost/benefit analysis he applies to implementing lines of code.”

Another user was equally scathing, declaring: “They’re anti-human humans. The most sickeningly evil thing imaginable.”