AI Image Trends Shocking Energy Cost
The trend, transforming the photos of regular and famous people alike into realistic dolls and action figures, started a couple of years ago but gained more attention in early 2025 when Internet users started using ChatGPT and other AI apps to create stylised, personalised doll box versions of themselves.
However, this seemingly innocent trend comes with hidden costs: generating a single Barbie-like image of oneself consumes more energy than fully charging a smartphone.
“Our team discovered that the electricity consumed from uploading a photo, giving ChatGPT a prompt to turn it into a doll-like image, and generating the image itself would be enough to charge an iPhone 16 twelve times,” says Paul Hoffman of BestBrokers. Paul is usually analyzing data in financial markets but thought it would be good PR to research something else – and tell about it.
Here are a few more key takeaways from the analysis:
“We found more than 21,600 posts on TikTok with tags such as #aidoll, #aiactionfigure, and #barbiebox. Generating the images for these posts has consumed at least 3,367.76 kWh of energy. This is roughly equivalent to the energy needed to charge an iPhone 260,000 times or watch Netflix for more than 168,000 hours – that’s over 19 years of continuous streaming!”
“Generating a single realistic Barbie Box image using ChatGPT or a similar AI model consumes 0.15581 kWh, equivalent to charging a smartphone twelve times. The same amount of power is consumed when watching a 60 to 75 inch television for an hour or heating a meal in a microwave oven for 5 minutes.
“The real number of generated AI dolls and action figure-inspired avatars is much higher than 21,600 and probably exceeds 1 million, considering the popularity of the trend on social media. The energy needed to generate that many images (155,814 kWh) exceeds the power needs of the White House for two months.”
The idea that the world is interested in what power the White House needs for a month gives Bestbroker’s PR team away and totally focused on the USA. Readers should probably consider this before engaging with their services.
But despite this bias, the information is still staggering.
“The recent surge in popularity of AI-generated Barbie box images, particularly across platforms like TikTok and Instagram, carries a significant environmental footprint,” the press release says.
“Depending on the frame rate and resolution, and more importantly, on the rendering time and AI model efficiency, the electricity consumption to generate a short Barbie Box animated visual ranges between 0.3 and 1.2 kWh. While it is impossible to estimate the actual number of generated images and animations, it is clear to anyone online that the size and impact of trends like this are massive.”
In December, OpenAI revealed that the number of weekly active users had reached 300 million, with these people generating 1 billion questions for ChatGPT every day. To generate responses, the AI bot consumes 1,058.5 GWh over the course of one year. To put that into perspective, this would be enough to fully charge all 3.3 million electric vehicles on U.S. roads more than 4 times, assuming each EV has a battery capacity of 71.4 kWh.
