Not a dollar amount - an energy cost. A water cost. A quiet, invisible environmental toll that accumulates with every prompt, every generated image, every automated email draft. Most of us have gotten very good at not thinking about it. The data centres are real, the strain on power grids is real, and the gap between how casually we use these tools and how much they actually cost the planet is getting harder to ignore. Today we're asking whether it's possible to use AI ethically - and what it might actually look like to try.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

The Verge reports that Fender CEO Bud Cole told an interviewer that "cover music has been sort of analogue AI for a long time," arguing that AI will help "create a whole new world of guitar players." The guitar community pushed back immediately and at volume. They pointed out the fairly significant difference between a human learning a song by ear and an AI ingesting millions of copyrighted tracks at scale to generate compositions without compensating a single original artist.

Cole also compared early skepticism about AI to early skepticism about the Telecaster. The Telecaster did not steal US$500 million worth of music to learn how to play itself.

While every other major tech company is racing to build more AI infrastructure, LinkedIn is doing the opposite. Wired reports that LinkedIn has decided to keep its data centre compute capacity flat for the next year. The platform's challenging its engineers to squeeze more performance out of existing hardware rather than expanding. It is one of the first high-profile examples of a major tech company explicitly pushing back against the AI infrastructure spending frenzy.

Electricity prices are up nearly 76% on the US's largest grid in the past year and data centres are facing mandatory power cuts. So LinkedIn's restraint is starting to look less like caution and more like common sense.

And finally, a genuinely smart piece of brand marketing from the alcohol-free space. Marketing Dive reports that Heineken has partnered with OpenTable on a pilot program that rewards designated drivers with rideshare vouchers and free Heineken 0.0 when they're appointed at the time of booking a restaurant reservation. The program was inspired by research showing 71% of Americans would be more likely to make safe ride home plans if prompted at the time of booking.

The nonalcoholic beer market grew 23% in 2025. Heineken isn't just selling a product here - it's building a genuinely useful service around the kind of person most likely to drink it.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

We sit in our home offices or local cafes, laptop open, leveraging state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models to speed up our research, write our pitches, generate our campaign assets, and optimise our workflows.

And, look, why wouldn’t we? After years of working our asses off and being bogged down by the sheer volume of sh*t we have to do in a 24-hour day, AI offers relief. An unparalleled level of creative and professional independence. We’re literally building our own sovereign empires out of thin air, using only a keyboard as our primary lever.

Because in doing so, we are forced to look at a giant fkn resource-guzzling machine that is boiling the biosphere.

We know the data centres are destroying the planet. It’s no longer a fringe environmental warning; it’s a visible, structural crisis.

The exponential build-out of insanely large industrial cloud facilities required to power these advanced reasoning models is putting unprecedented strain on global energy grids and local water tables.

Millions of gallons of pristine water are pumped into server racks every single day. All just to keep the hardware from melting while it processes our creative requests. Like what in the actual world are we doing here?

We have entered a bizarre environmental paradox. Because now, our daily creative leverage requires us to participate in an extractive ecosystem that feels like it’s genuinely speedrunning our collective extinction.

So, how do we handle this ethical crisis without completely throwing our laptops into the bush and reverting to typewriter isolation? Because that’s just not realistic, is it?

The first step toward absolute sanity requires us to reject the corporate gaslighting of tech-bro "carbon neutrality" certificates. Buying a handful of offset credits or planting a virtual forest doesn't change the immediate physical load on the power station down the road. Be so for real.

True ethical optimisation requires us to develop a strict internal filter, a protocol of deep tactical restraint. We have to stop treating these hyper-powered reasoning engines like an infinite, free amusement park ride for our passing curiosities.

The next time you find yourself about to feed a lazy, multi-paragraph prompt into a model instead of just googling (or even using your brain for more that 2.5 seconds) or generating forty different variations of an image you don't actually need, stop yourself.

I’m so serious.

This means transitioning our workflow from mindless dependency to a framework of high-intent leverage. Stop using frontier, multi-billion-parameter cloud models for basic, low-level administrative tasks that can be handled by localised, low-power software.

If you are just checking a piece of copy for typos, sorting a basic spreadsheet column, or searching your own document archives, you don't need to fire up a massive cloud computing server bank in another hemisphere. Like… think about it.

These can run locally on your own laptop's processing chip without drawing a single watt of data centre power. Save the massive cloud queries exclusively for the high-stakes, structural creative problems that genuinely require that level of computational intelligence (and I’m not sure they even do tbh.)

And… on a much more personal level, the real work begins when we stop letting the relentless digital hype convince us that a life without automation is a life that is falling behind.

Not every single email needs to be perfect. Not every brainstorm needs a generative assistant to kick-start it. And not every single creative thought needs to be immediate.

The more we outsource our thinking to a network of water-guzzling servers, the more we distance ourselves from the raw texture of our own minds and the complexity of our thoughts. I can feel the wrinkles in my brain smoothing out as we speak.

The ultimate act of personal sovereignty in a world obsessed with automated scale is having the confidence to trust your own hands to build the thing. We have done this for thousands of years.

We don't need to feed the machine every second of our lives just to prove we are productive. And we don’t need to destroy the planet while we’re at it.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The sound comes from TikToker Andrømeda // KOTAG, who attempted to scream as loud as he could for exactly one second. After a brief chuckle, he produced a very committed "AH!" and the internet ran with it.

Some of my favourite examples:

Film yourself lipsyncing along to the sound, step out of frame as you scream, then cut the video so it looks like you vanish on impact. Add whatever situation triggered your disappearance as your on-screen text.

A few ideas to get you started:

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

Hey Renée!

I know you’re probably talking about having an aesthetic IG grid, and there’s absolutely a place for that. But unless you already have a following, pretty product photos probably won’t be enough to grow your account from zero. Instead, I’d think about how you’re going to create content that will make your target audience care about your brand. This means your first job is making it relevant to them. So, think about who you want to reach and what they care about.

In addition, you need to convey a human truth in your content. This should be something everyone intuitively understands, and something that connects to your brand. For example, a coffee brand may speak to the human truth that loneliness is on the rise and we're all looking for moments of connection. So, what’s the deeper human truth your products connect to? Once you can answer that, create your content around that, as it’s what will make it truly resonate with your audience.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.