A coalition of environmental groups has warned that claims that artificial intelligence will help solve the climate crisis are misguided, with the technology instead likely cause rising energy use and turbocharge the spread of climate disinformation.
Big tech companies and the United Nations have touted advances in AI as a way to help ameliorate global heating, via tools that help track deforestation, identify pollution leaks and track extreme weather events. AI is already being used to predict droughts in Africa and to measure changes to melting icebergs.
Available reports show that Google, which has developed its own AI program called Bard (recently rebranded to Gemini) and has an AI project to make traffic lights more efficient, has been at the forefront of promoting emissions reductions through AI adoption, releasing a report last year that found AI could cut global emissions by as much as 10%, equivalent to the entire carbon pollution put out by the European Union by 2030.
“AI has a really major role in addressing climate change,” said Kate Brandt, Google’s chief sustainability officer, said in December, describing the technology at an “inflection point” in making major progress in environmental goals.
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However, a new report by green groups has cast doubt over whether the AI revolution will have a positive impact upon the climate crisis, warning that the technology will spur growing energy use from data centers and the proliferation of falsehoods about climate science.
“We seem to be hearing all the time that AI can save the planet, but we shouldn’t be believing this hype,” said Michael Khoo, climate disinformation program director at Friends of the Earth, which is part of the Climate Action against Disinformation coalition that put out the report.
“It’s not like AI is ridding us of the internal combustion engine. People will be outraged to see how much more energy is being consumed by AI in the coming years, as well as how it will flood the zone with disinformation about climate change.”
The burgeoning electricity demands of AI means that a doubling of data centers to help keep pace with the industry will cause an 80% increase in planet-heating emissions, even if there are measures to improve the energy efficiency of these centers, the new report states.
In the US, there is already evidence that the life of coal-fired power plants is being prolonged to meet the rising energy demands of AI. In just three years from now, AI servers could be consuming as much energy as Sweden does, separate research has found.
Much of this increased energy demand comes from the added complexity of AI operations – generating AI queries could require as much as 10 times the computing power as a regular online search. Training ChatGPT, the OpenAI system, can use as much energy as 120 US households over the course of a year, the report claims.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
