The Hidden Cost of "Just Ask AI": A Guide to Green Prompting

In a perfect and ideal world, powerful technologies with built‑in biases, significant environmental footprints, and deep social impacts would not be rolled out to everyone - especially non‑technical people - without clear instructions and safeguards. However, we don’t live in a perfect or ideal world, and since late 2022, one example of such a tool has been available to anyone with an internet connection: ChatGPT, followed by many more generative AI tools.

Fast forward to 2026 and these tools are now integrated into search engines, messaging apps, text editors, document creation apps, social media, and every other corner of the digital world. It goes without saying that these tools can be used for various tasks in uncontrollable ways (TL;DR: studies have shown that it is the fastest-adopted technology in history).

As developers, technicians and sustainability advocates, we can contribute to raising awareness of and limiting the environmental impact of our products, but what can we do as users? Furthermore, how can people with no digital skills use generative AI in a more sustainable way?

In this session, I will cover green prompting and share instructions that anyone can apply. I will show that, by carefully crafting prompts, it is possible to reduce the environmental footprint of AI systems while maintaining high-quality results.