HOUSTON, TX — Marketing agency FernPoint Creative celebrated the run-up to Earth Day on Tuesday by commissioning an AI-generated image of a pristine boreal forest for its client Meridian Chemical, a process that data-center records confirm required 14.2 gallons of drinking water, roughly six trees’ worth of server electricity, and one intern named Kayla who cried a little.
The image, which depicts a slightly cross-eyed elk standing in a meadow that contains no fewer than three impossible flowers, was posted at 9:04 a.m. with the caption “This Earth Day, let’s protect what matters.” It received 47 likes and one reply from a bot congratulating Meridian Chemical on its wedding.
“The prompt was ‘majestic untouched wilderness, no logos, hopeful,'” said Brandt Ossler, FernPoint’s VP of Sustainable Storytelling. “We ran it eleven times because the elk kept having too many legs. On the twelfth pass we got an elk with the correct number of legs and a pond that appears to be on fire, but we cropped that part out. Total run time was about forty minutes, which industry-wide is considered efficient.”
According to a data-center technician in The Dalles, Oregon, who declined to give his name because he was eating a sandwich, the twelve rendering passes drew approximately 14.2 gallons of municipal water for evaporative cooling. “That’s a shower and a half,” he said. “For an elk.”
Meridian Chemical, which last year settled a $3.1 million suit related to groundwater contamination in a small Louisiana parish, thanked FernPoint for the graphic in a follow-up post that used a different AI model to generate an image of a child releasing a butterfly. That image consumed an additional 9 gallons and rendered the child with what appear to be seven fingers, though the company noted it “loved the energy.”
Industry watchdogs say the practice has exploded in the past 18 months. “Every Fortune 500 company is doing this now,” said Priya Halverson, who runs a small Substack about corporate environmental communications from her kitchen. “They can’t hire a photographer to shoot a real forest because photographers cost money and forests are increasingly on fire. So they type ‘forest, but nice’ into a machine that lives in a warehouse and drinks the Columbia River.”
Meridian’s post is one of an estimated 400,000 AI-generated Earth Day graphics scheduled for release across corporate social channels this week, collectively projected to consume the annual water usage of Boise. A spokesperson for the Atlantic Heartland Project, an environmental nonprofit, called the trend “a really elegant self-portrait of the problem.”
Reached for comment, FernPoint’s Ossler defended the campaign by noting that the agency had offset the water usage by having everyone in the office skip their afternoon iced coffees, saving approximately 14 ounces per employee. Asked whether that math worked out, Ossler said he was “not a math guy” but added that the elk, in his opinion, looked “really at peace.”
The post is scheduled to be deleted Thursday morning to make room for a Mother’s Day graphic, which is currently rendering.