One thing that I like the most about this studio is that it pushes us to actively learn through research. Throughout my learning journey, I’ve never taken any courses where the contents are so new, fresh, and constantly changing. I really enjoyed the mini presentation we did in Wednesday’s class, although I have to admit that I wasn’t fully awake for the first half of the lesson.
In order to answer the questions that were given, we have to do quite a bit of research. After considering topics like Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro claiming to surpass ChatGPT 4o, we decided to look into something that seems to be more related to our everyday life – the impacts of artificial intelligence on our ecosystem. To be honest, as someone that has dedicated $30 to it every month and used it every day, I got a bit guilty when I discovered that “one query to ChatGPT uses approximately as much electricity as could light one light bulb for about 20 minutes” (Dodge 2024). What was even more surprising to me is that, although the big-tech companies have proposed plans to reduce negative environmental impacts, their energy consumption and carbon emission have not shown any signs of decrease in the previous years. Instead, according to the Environmental Report google published earlier this year, their carbon dioxide emission has increased by 48% since 2019.
I know that climate change and global warming have become old and cliche topics that almost make people sick of, but there have definitely been some moments during my research when I doubted whether AI is even worth developing considering the detrimental effects it poses on our ecosystem, and whether people have been blinded and actively chosen to not look at the negative side when the positives are deemed so “revolutionising”. But in the next moment, I heard the interesting stories presented by another group about how AI has contributed to analysing climate and animal behaviours to conserve the earth. For example, as Lily wrote in her blog, AI could be used to “speak or communicate with endangered birds” and “ lead us to understand why this breed is endangered” (Mao 2024).
Through receiving different ideas from the activity, I found myself to be quite intrigued by the debates surrounding whether negative impacts brought by AI have outweighed the positives, and so I decided to do some further research. I found an interesting article published in April this year, which argues that the current evaluation of environmental impacts brought by AI is insufficient (Bugeau, Combaz, et al. 2024). This is because electricity flows and greenhouse gases have been almost the sole focus of many studies, and material flows such as the usage of water, human toxicity and non-renewable materials are often overlooked. I found this article interesting because it has addressed an issue that I haven’t noticed about the news report I used for the presentation: Just like the study states, the news article has indeed only looked at electricity and greenhouse gases, lacking information on other perspectives of AI.
Although there are already many studies done on evaluating the sustainability of AI, much information is still lacking compared to other fields of environmental studies because AI is still fastly developing. I will definitely make a note of the discoveries I made this week, as I believe that a topic like this that has interested me would be of greater use someday in my future.
References:
Kaur D (August 2 2024). The hidden climate cost of AI: How tech giants are struggling to go green, AI News, https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/news/the-hidden-climate-cost-ai-how-tech-giants-struggling-go-green/
Google (2024). Environmental Report, Google, https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2024-environmental-report.pdf
Dodge J (July 10 2024). Artificial intelligence’s thirst for electricity Transcript, NPR, https://www.npr.org/2024/07/10/nx-s1-5028558/artificial-intelligences-thirst-for-electricity
Mao L (August 11 2024). Week 3 blog post – Augmenting Creativity, https://www.mediafactory.org.au/lily-mao/2024/08/11/week-3-blog-post-augmenting-creativity/