so.. um.. how do y’all feel about carbon emissions of gen ai(awkward)

so.. um… how do y’all feel about the carbon emissions of gen ai(awkward.)

an awkward topic. elephant in the room. a hot potato. ugly truth. whatever. (i can go on; i love idioms) but if there are two topics gen-z cares about – due to their great impact on the generation – I believe it’s climate change and gen AI. They quite literally shape our lives. i’ve started to think… can they really go together? are we talking about it? not really.

A single ChatGPT query can generate 100 times¹ more carbon than a regular Google search(this is true i asked GPT)². Google has officially dropped its title to be carbon neutral this month³. MS just made the largest purchase of carbon credits in history last month.⁴

btw all three made the news within the last 8 months – so yea this is pretty much happening in real time. i just feel like we’re not talking about the dynamic of gen ai and its environmental impact as much as we should because we so wanna avoid it. WE will be the biggest beneficiaries of gen ai. WE will be the biggest victims of climate change. so do we wanna talk about this love-hate inverse proportion? nah.

like i’m sorry to be a party pooper and the fact that the planet is on track to become uninhabitable is def not as exciting as GPT’s next update. look I’m just as clueless as you but i rly don’t want us to be a convenient hypocrite. this needs to be reminded, talked about, and something that we deeply care about. so badly.

*what do you mean they bought carbon credits?
Companies have to buy carbon credits so they compensate for some of their greenhouse gas emissions by funding projects that reduce emissions elsewhere. This carbon offset makes them carbon neutral. So in reality carbon neutral means they’re just buying out, doesn’t mean they have 0 carbon emissions

this is not to be confused with energy of electrical power – in terms of Wh, a single ChatGPT query can generate 10 times more Wh(2.9Wh) than a regular Google search(0.3Wh) according to International Energy Agency. ↩︎
“Tackling AI’s Climate Change Problem,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Dec 2023, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/tackling-ais-climate-change-problem. ↩︎
“Google Is No Longer Claiming to Be Carbon Neutral,” Bloomberg, July 2024, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-08/google-is-no-longer-claiming-to-be-carbon-neutral ↩︎
“Microsoft Strikes 2 Record-Breaking Carbon Credit Deals,” Carbon Credits, June 2024, https://carboncredits.com/microsoft-strikes-2-record-breaking-carbon-credit-deals/ ↩︎