The Receipt
TXN: /the-receipt
Art of FACELESS · punk publishing
The Receipt
What Your Outrage Actually Costs the Grid
Harm = energy × uses
That's the missing word from the card. You found it. Now let's add up what it costs, all of it, for all of us.
What's true.
Data centres do real damage. They drink water. They strain grids. They get built next to towns that never asked for them.
None of that is in dispute, and nothing here pretends otherwise.
In 2024, data centres used about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity, roughly 1.5% of everything the world consumed (IEA). That figure keeps rising, and AI is part of the reason.
But AI isn't the whole building. It's one tenant.
Who else lives here.
- Streaming
- Gaming
- Cloud backups
- The ad that followed you
- The feed
- The algorithm
- AI
- Crypto
- Video autoplay
- You, right now
All of it runs in the same data centres, on the same grids, drinking the same water. Including the algorithm that served you a handwritten sign telling you AI is ruining everything.
The company behind Instagram and Facebook used 18.4 million megawatt-hours in 2024 (Energy Factbook). That's about 4% of all the data-centre electricity on Earth. One company, much of it spent deciding what you scroll past.
Do the sums.
1 hour of streaming ≈ 57 AI images
1 AI image ≈ 1 minute of video
Sources: Google · Luccioni et al. via Wearview · IEA
The sign.
We wrote one by hand. You may have seen it.
It cost a pen, a bit of card and a few minutes. Then it was filmed, uploaded, stored, copied into different resolutions, backed up and pushed out by an algorithm to your screen.
- 1 view≈ 1 AI image
- 1,000 views≈ 950 images
- 100,000 views≈ 95,000 images
The handwritten sign was the most expensive thing in the video.
That's not a gotcha. It's the point. Nothing online is offline. "Made by hand" stops being made by hand the second it hits a server.
What's really objected to.
The usual line: platforms are unavoidable, AI in the background is fine, but AI you can see is cheap.
Look at what that line protects. Not the planet. Not the town next to the data centre. Appearances.
Visible harm gets outrage.
Invisible harm gets likes.
If the objection were really about energy, it would cover the scroll, the stream, the autoplay, the game and the backup. It almost never does, because that's uncomfortable, isn't it? It doesn't suit the narrative. There's always a "yeah, but, what about…?"
Everything is dirty money.
Every platform you're reading this on makes money from your attention. Every like, comment and argument is revenue for someone, often the same companies running the data centres.
So we opt out where we can. No ads. No monetisation. Comments off, except here on our own site. We're not selling this argument. We're saying it once.
We make no money from this. None.
And there's a cost nobody puts on a receipt. The open web taught everyone that creative work should be free. Music, writing, art, film: stream it, screenshot it, share it, never pay for it.
Something is still paying. The data centres, the platforms and the advertisers make money. The people who stopped getting paid were the ones who made the work. Plenty of creatives who used to earn a living lost it that way. We were among them.
So when someone says AI is taking artists' livelihoods, ask who took them first. And who's still clicking "free".
No Face. No Performance. No Proof Required.
We'll count
- Watt-hours
- Water
- Views × minutes
- Money in, money out
We won't prove
- How the work was made
- Our hands, our process
- Timelapses on demand
- Which tool did which bit
Let's be clear, so nobody twists it. The Receipt asks for proof of environmental impact. It does not ask for proof of creative process. Those are different things.
Energy can be measured. Watt-hours are published, checked and argued over in the open. "Proof" of process can't. Sketches, timelapses, "show your workings" and AI detectors are subjective and unvalidated. OpenAI pulled its own AI text detector in 2023 over its "low rate of accuracy" (Search Engine Journal). Stanford researchers found detectors routinely flag non-native English writers as AI (Stanford HAI).
For many artists, including disabled artists, the tools are how the work gets made at all. That's a fact that belongs in the accounting, not a plea, and it's nobody's business to audit.
Count the watts. Don't police the work.
Build it with us.
We're not making receipts a rule for every project. That would be a tax on the work, and nobody needs another form. Instead, we're opening an R&D project: a simple, shared way for any studio or artist to estimate what a piece costs the planet.
Just trying to work it out changes how you see everything you make, watch and share. That's the point.
Cost = Make + Ship + Watch
- Make
- (text prompts × 0.24 Wh) + (AI images × 1.35 Wh) + everything else we can't see yet
- Ship
- Uploads, storage, copies, backups. Unknown: platforms don't publish this.
- Watch
- views × minutes watched × 1.28 Wh
Example: a 60-second film, 1,000 views
Watch = 1,000 × 1 × 1.28 = 1,280 Wh ≈ 1.3 kWh
Make + Ship = ? ← that question mark is the story
It's v0.1 and it's wrong in places. We know. Help us fix it:
- Better figures, with sources, especially for music, games, 3D and print.
- The missing bits: devices, networks, the "Ship" line.
- What it looks like for a studio, a band, a solo illustrator.
Comments are open here, on our own site, and nowhere else.
Our receipt
The Receipt
ART OF FACELESS · CARDIFF
research + drafting; energy not disclosed by provider
day one, so far. declared, not proof
prorated hours + direct consumables + hosting. not a hobby. never has been
TXN: /the-receipt
NO REFUNDS ON SELECTIVE OUTRAGE
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
We'll show you oursif you show us yours.
Use this.
Sharing isn't endorsement, and re-use isn't permission to lampoon. Crediting us doesn't mean we agree with you. If our work is altered or used in a way that misrepresents it, we'll ask for our name to be removed, and we'll say so publicly. This work was given away, not abandoned. We're keeping receipts on that too.
Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (share unchanged, non-commercial, with credit). Anything else needs our permission.
Sources
- IEA, Energy and AI: data centres 415 TWh, ~1.5% of global electricity, 2024
- Energy Factbook: Meta 18.4 million MWh, 2024
- Google Cloud: median Gemini text prompt 0.24 Wh
- Luccioni et al., "Power Hungry Processing", via Wearview: 1.35 Wh median image; 11.49 Wh least efficient
- IEA: streaming ~0.077 kWh per hour
- Search Engine Journal: OpenAI withdraws AI classifier, 2023
- Stanford HAI: AI detectors biased against non-native English writers
Notes: image figures are from open models tested in 2022–23. Streaming is the IEA's 2019 central estimate. View figures are calculated from the streaming rate, not measured on any platform. Real numbers vary with device, network and model.