By: Nathan Williamson & Weston Ubell - April 8, 2024

What is AI? AI stands for artificial intelligence. It is an algorithm created by humans that can process information more efficiently than humans, and without mistakes. AI can conduct the same tasks as humans and more but with greater speed and accuracy. However, there are significant environmental drawbacks.

While AI has many perks, such as generating pages of words in a few seconds, the environmental cost of training one is very high. Training an AI is a process that consists of feeding it bits of data that help it give accurate responses to questions it is asked. One major disadvantage of this is that it needs a significant amount of power, which is usually generated by burning fossil fuels. Just ChatGPT-3 produced 502 tons of carbon, to train! After that, it produces 8.4 tons per use. It gets ten million uses in a day. That is 84,000,000 tons, in a day! 

 Credit: cacm.acm.org 

“The safest way to consider AI’s carbon footprint is simply to consider it as a subset of the overall ICT (information and communications technology) carbon footprint, which is broadly estimated to be between 1.8% to 2.8% as of 2020,” says Matt Warburton, the principal consultant and sustainability lead for global technology research and advisory firm ISG. According to a Patterns article from 2021, the carbon emissions caused by AI are estimated to be within the range of 1.8% to 3.9% of all the emissions worldwide. "The impacts are therefore modest in comparison with more polluting industries such as manufacturing and transportation,” Warburton says.

AI is also being used to do all the wrong things. We have amazing technology that is already bad for the environment, and we are using it to make fake essays and roleplays instead of offsetting their carbon emissions and or "I think that AI should be used to do things we do not want to do, not things that we want to do. For example, taking the trash out of the ocean is something that we do not want to do, so why don't we figure out a way to make AI do it? Instead of making it write essays for us let's try making it help us fix pollution or climate change." says Jayme Zander, an environmentalist who specializes in AI.

"Well, generating art is theft." says Ian Anastas, an artist who can feel the impacts of AI. "I also think that people are just going to depend on AI to do everything for us and we won't think for ourselves. So in conclusion, we should use it to solve big problems like cancer instead of stealing art."

"AI is great in medicine, but we are misusing it." this was Madeleine Craig, a graduate of Harvard medical school, who has been practicing medicine for thirty years. "I mean, it's just not sustainable, and we're losing productivity." If we continue to rely on AI as much as we are right now, we will not use our imagination, we will just write something like "Purple Platypus with a top-hat" into an AI. Which steals then generates it.

Chartr.com is a website that provides learning resources on the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it affects the environment. The website features a collection of articles, research papers, and charts that are easy to understand, even for those who aren't experts in the wonders of AI. It's a great resource for anyone who wants to learn about the environmental impact of AI. 

Fun Facts

• AI has been around for many years. Even though it's often seen as a new technology, the idea has existed since the 1950s. In the beginning, AI systems were used for tasks like playing chess and solving math problems. 

• AI is already a part of our lives. We can find AI in various areas, such as voice assistants (like Siri and Alexa) or even on streaming platforms like Netflix or YouTube.

• AI can help doctors find out if someone is sick by looking at pictures of their body. This can help them find the sickness early so that they can treat it better.