In researching for this article, I searched for the environmental impacts of AI after hearing various claims for months, but the only articles that popped up were incredibly positive in a way that could only indicate sugarcoating.
TLDR: You should care about things that negatively effect other people even if it doesn’t specifically effect YOU right now
Upon an embarrassing amount of searching, I found a report that actually analyzed and tested these sugarcoated claims, and found that 97% of the claims analyzed weren't even referencing the effects of generative AI. Instead, in lumping generative and non-generative AI together, described only as “AI”, the positive effects of non-generative AI were sneakily mentioned as positives despite overwhelming negative effects of generative AI.
An important distinction to note:
Generative AI: Trained with existing content to generate “new” content.
Non-generative (traditional) AI: Trained with existing data to track data trends.
Since emissions and environmental impact data with respect to generative AI is not available, it must be estimated. Hopefully, in the future, there will be legislation to mandate transparency with AI usage effects. You have to consider, if it’s “so good for the environment”, why isn’t the data available to back it up?
Based on multiple factors (see Source 2, this is what I call some legit estimations), just TRAINING the GPT-3 model was estimated to cost an average of 5.3 million liters of water in US data centers. While information on GPT-4 is not available in this source, it is estimated to be higher than that for GPT-3 due to increased complexity of the model.
In addition to the one time water cost of training GPT-3, the cost of water per query on average was estimated as around 0.5oz. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but with over 2.5 billion queries per day, it adds up.
(Note, this is just for GPT-3, there is no estimation for GPT-4, which is slightly incredibly terrifying)
You may also be horrified, or you may still be wondering the age old question:
Why should I care?
According to the UN, we have officially entered a state of freshwater “bankruptcy” so extreme that it is IMPOSSIBLE to return to the new baseline.
But wait, there's hope!
Actions need to be taken in light of the current conditions to preserve what we still have. But will they? I’d like to think so, but I have no idea!
Source (1)
Source (2)