With global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees for the first time in a year, stakeholders are wondering where the bulk of the responsibility should lie to prevent the climate crisis from worsening. AI does not help to stop this unstoppable warming.
Climate change continues to be a matter of vital importance for both consumers and companies amidst these global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, which is a bad omen for the public image of any company that uses AI tools that consume without keeping their carbon footprint under control.
And what is more important, the unbridled and uncontrolled use of AI could have disastrous consequences for the environment, due to the high energy and water consumption required by the servers that power AI.
Despite the apparent ecological apathy of recent legislation, such as the EU AI law and President Biden’s executive order, which largely focus on other aspects of AI responsibility, some of the leading AI players have begun to self-regulate proactively and work towards sustainable AI use. Here are some ways in which AI leaders are addressing AI with ecological awareness.
Artificial Intelligence for Specific Purposes
Many of the drawbacks of generative AI and LLM stem from the enormous data warehouses that need to be traversed to extract value. This not only poses risks in terms of ethics, accuracy, and privacy, but also greatly exacerbates the amount of energy required to use these tools.
Instead of very general AI tools, companies have started to opt for more specific AI, specialized in specific tasks and objectives. For example, ABBYY has adopted this approach by training its machine learning models and natural language processing to specifically read and understand documents that go through the company’s systems as if they were humans.
With pre-trained AI skills to process very specific types of documents with 95% accuracy, organizations can save trees by eliminating the use of paper, while reducing the amount of carbon emitted through cumbersome document management processes.
Train the developers
AI companies don’t have to bear the burden of sustainable AI on their own: some are proactively putting the ball in the developers’ court.
OpenAI, the pioneering company in responsible artificial intelligence behind the popular ChatGPT, recently announced that developers can create their own “GPT” platforms for specialized purposes.
This allows developers and organizations to limit the use of AI with a high degree of customization, cutting excessive functions and data that amplify ecological damage.
For example, developers could design GPT for limited purposes such as creative writing tips, culinary information, technical support, or any other specific niche.
Sustainable business practices
Companies should also move away from the technology itself and look within their organization for more ways to harness AI sustainably. For example, Microsoft revealed that its AI support hardware runs exclusively on clean energy, which exempts them from creating so-called “operational emissions”.
In addition, companies can use AI as a tool to explore other facets of their business where sustainability could be prioritized. Forrester highlights the measurement, reporting, and data visualization capabilities of artificial intelligence to suggest that it could drive a climate revolution on its own.
Although objectively important, emissions are not the only metric used to encompass ecological impacts: studies have shown that a combination of robotics and AI has reduced herbicide use in some contexts by 90%.
While companies continue to grapple with the usefulness and consequences of AI, they must explore the full breadth of its ability to enhance and contribute to sustainability.
