By Caleigh Wells, Associated Press
Marissa Loewen started to use artificial intelligence for the first time in 2014 as a project management tool. She has autism and ADHD and said it helped enormously in organizing her thoughts.
“However, we try to use it conscientiously, because we realize that there is an impact on the environment,” she said.
Her personal AI use is no longer unique. Now it is a position in smartphones, search engines, word processors and e -mail services. Every time someone uses AI, it uses energy that is often generated by fossil fuels. That gives greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and contributes to climate change.
And it becomes more difficult to live without.
The climate costs
AI is largely powered by data centers who ask for questions, store data and implement information. As AI is omnipresent, the power is Ask for data centers Increases, leading to problems with the reliability of grid for people Living nearby.
“Because we try to build data centers at a pace where we can no longer integrate renewable energy sources into the net, most new data centers are powered by fossil fuels,” said Noman Bashir, Computing and Climate Impact Fellow with MIT’s climate and sustainability consortium.
The data centers also generate heat, so they trust fresh water to stay cool. According to an article from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, larger centers can consume up to 5 million gallons (18.9 million liters) per day. That is about the same as the daily demand for water for a city of up to 50,000 people.
It is hard to imagine, because for most users the impact is not visible, AI and Climate Lead Sasha Luccioni with the AI ​​company, cuddled face.
“In one of my studies we found that generating a High-Definition image uses as much energy as charging half of your phone. And people had something like: ‘That can’t be true, because when I use Midjourney (a generative AI program), my telephone battery is not about.
Jon Ippolito, professor of new media at the University of Maine, said that technology companies are constantly working to make chips and data centers more efficient, but that does not mean that the impact of AI will shrink. This is due to a problem called the Jevons Paradox.
“The cheaper means, the more we tend to use them,” he said. When cars replaced horses, he said, the living work did not wriggle. We have just traveled further.
Ai’s footprint quantify
How many those programs contribute to global warming depends on many factors, including how hot it is outside the data center that the query processes, how clean the grid is and how complex the AI ​​task is.
Information sources about AI’s contributions to climate change are incomplete and contradictory, so it’s hard to get exact numbers.
But Ippolito tried it anyway.
He an app built This compares the environmental footprint of various digital tasks based on the limited data that he could find. It estimates that a simple AI prompt, such as ‘Tell me the capital of France’, uses 23 times more energy than the same question that is typed in Google without its AI overview function.
“Instead of working with existing materials, it writes them all over again. And that costs much more calculations,” said Luccioni.
And that is only for a simple prompt. A complex prompt, such as: “Tell me the number of gummy bears that could fit into the Pacific Ocean,” uses 210 times more energy than the AI-free Google search. A video of 3 seconds, according to the Ippolito app, uses 15,000 times as much energy. It is the same as switching on a light bulb and leaving it on for more than a year.
It has a major impact, but it does not mean that our technical footprints were carbon -free before AI entered the scene.
For example, viewing an hour of Netflix uses more energy than a complex AI text prompt. An hour on Zoom with 10 people uses 10 times as much.
“It is not only about people to make aware of AI’s impact, but also all these digital activities that we naturally consider,” he said.
Limited tech, limit the climate impact of Tech
Ippolito said he limits his use of AI when he can. He proposes to use images captured by people instead of AI generated. He tells the AI ​​to stop generating as soon as he has the answer to waste extra energy. He asks for concise answers and he starts typing Google search assignments by “-ai”, so that it does not offer AI overview for questions where he does not need it.
Loewen has adopted the same approach. She said she is trying to organize her thoughts in one AI question instead of asking it a series of iterative questions. She also built her own AI that is not dependent on large data centers, which save energy in the same way as watching a film that you own on a DVD is much less burdensome than streaming.
“If you have something locally on your computer in your home, you can also control your use of the electricity and consumption. This allows you to control your data a little more,” she said.
Luccioni uses Ecosia, a search engine that uses efficient algorithms and uses profit to plant trees to minimize the impact of each search. The AI ​​function can also be switched off.
Chatgpt also has a temporary chat function, so that the questions you send to the data center are removed after a few weeks instead of taking storage space from the data center.
But AI only records a fraction of the energy consumption of the data center. Ippolito estimates that around 85% data collection is from sites such as Tiktok and Instagram and Cryptocurrency.
His answer there: make use of screen time restrictions on your phone to limit the time on scrolling on social media. Less time means less personal data collected, less used energy and water and fewer carbon emissions that enter the atmosphere.
“If you can do something that a data center cuts out of the comparison, I think that’s a victory,” said Ippolito.
The climate and environmental cover of the Associated Press receives financial support from several private foundations. AP is only responsible for all content. Find APs standards For working with philanthropias, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas on AP.org.
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