Every AI chatbot has a little dropdown at the top now. Fast, Thinking, Pro, Expert, Heavy, Max, depending on which one you're in. For a long time I never touched mine. Whatever the heaviest setting was, that's where it sat, whether the question was hard or dumb.
I figured more was better. I think most people do. It looks like the dial on a hair dryer.
I got into AI early, and I want to be clear about what that means. I'm not some genius at it. I just started before a lot of people did, and I kept at it. I've made a French syllable trainer with it, a slingshot mini-golf game, a map of a thousand years of Detroit, and a system that runs a good chunk of my life. (I call it LUCID.) I love this stuff, so take what follows as coming from a fan.
But I can't stress this enough: these are incredibly powerful tools, and they take a tremendous amount of resources to run. When something's that powerful, you don't get to be casual about it.
When I fought wildfire, nobody got near a chainsaw until they were certified on one. It's the same reason you need a license for a truck but not for a hammer. AI skipped all of that. It showed up on everybody's phone more or less overnight, mostly free, and the training is a blinking cursor.
I'm not putting this all on users. The companies pick the defaults, and eventually somebody will write laws. But you and I are the ones typing, and that's the part we control. So this is what I think we owe: ourselves first, then each other, then the planet.
Ourselves
My first job out of college made me good at Excel, the building-media-plans kind of good. That got me into data, data got me into building systems, and here I am. These days I barely write a formula by hand. I just describe what I want. At some point I noticed that and didn't love it.
That's the trade nobody mentions. It feels like you did the work, and you didn't. If you let it, the stuff you used to be good at goes soft.
It also lies to you sometimes, with a perfectly straight face. I once got a fact from it that sounded completely right and turned out not to exist anywhere. I came very close to using it. I check things now. Not everything, but anything that matters.
Then there's the good part. The syllable trainer and the slingshot game were ideas I'd had kicking around for years with no way to build them, and then suddenly I could. Nobody needed either one. I made them anyway, and that might be my favorite thing about all of this. Don't let it all be productivity.
Each other
I think people deserve some basic things: respect, an education, healthcare, good food, safety, work that means something, clean air and clean water. And some joy.
AI can help with a lot of that, which is wild to type. A kid whose family can't afford a tutor can get one. Someone can get a lab report explained in plain English before they see the doctor again. A small business owner can do the marketing, the website and the bookkeeping they could never afford to hire out.
That last one cuts the other way too. Every time a small business doesn't have to hire a designer, there's a designer who didn't get hired. I've watched AI take work away from people. That's real, and it's why work that means something is on the list.
So I try to hold both. Use it to get people the things they should have, and don't use it to take those things away from someone else.
The planet
Back to that dropdown.
A single prompt doesn't use much. Google put out its own numbers in August 2025: the median text prompt in Gemini used about 0.24 watt-hours of electricity and about a quarter of a milliliter of water. That's nine seconds of TV and five drops of water.
A few things about that number, though. It's the median. It's for a text prompt. It came from Google, about Google, and Google says nobody independently checked it. The thinking modes, the ones at the heavy end of that dropdown, work by writing out a long chain of reasoning before they answer you, and all of that gets computed. So when you crank the dial, you're asking for a lot more than nine seconds of TV.
And there are a lot of us. The International Energy Agency figures data centers used around 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, and it expects around 945 by 2030. That's more than Japan uses in a year, and AI is the main reason it's climbing.
(I'm not an energy guy. I just read the footnotes.)
Me switching from Heavy to Fast isn't going to fix that. I know. But companies build for how people actually use their stuff. If everybody runs everything on max, that's what gets built. If people get used to picking the right setting, that gets built instead. Norms are something users set.
For reference, here's roughly what the settings are called as of October 2026:
| Light | Middle | Heavy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude | Haiku, or low effort | Sonnet, medium or high effort | Opus, effort at xhigh or max |
| ChatGPT | Instant | Thinking (Standard) | Thinking (Extended), Pro, Heavy |
| Gemini | Fast | Thinking | Pro, Deep Think |
| Grok | Fast | Auto, Expert | Heavy |
So, the era
I don't think anyone's going to announce this. There won't be a press release. It starts whenever enough regular people decide to treat these tools like the big deal they are. We're early, which is kind of the good news. Nobody's written the manners yet, so we can.
Here's what that looks like for me, day to day. I pick the lightest setting that'll do the job. Rewording an email or a quick question gets light. Something I'd want a smart coworker to think about for a minute gets the middle. A nasty bug, or anything with real money or health on the line, gets heavy. And if Google would answer it, I just use Google.
I check the work when it matters. I try to point it at something useful for somebody else, not just for me. And I still do some of the hard stuff myself, on purpose, so I don't forget how.
The hair dryer has a low setting. Use it.
Story and words by Tom Lucido.
Sources: Google Cloud, "Measuring the environmental impact of AI inference" (Aug 2025) · IEA, Energy and AI · Anthropic, effort and thinking · OpenAI Help Center, GPT-5.5 in ChatGPT · Gemini app release notes · The Tech Outlook, Grok modes