Associated Press: AI ‘brings a hidden climate cost’ – ‘Releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere & contributes to climate change’

As AI becomes part of everyday life, it brings a hidden climate cost

By CALEIGH WELLS, Associated Press

Excerpt: Every time someone uses AI, it uses energy that is often generated by fossil fuels. That releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and contributes to climate change.

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“Since we are trying to build data centers at a pace where we cannot integrate more renewable energy resources into the grid, most of the new data centers are being powered by fossil fuels,” said Noman Bashir, computing and climate impact fellow with MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium.

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Quantifying AI’s footprint
How much those programs contribute to global warming depends on a lot of factors, including how warm it is outside the data center that’s processing the query, how clean the grid is and how complex the AI task is.

Information sources on AI’s contributions to climate change are incomplete and contradictory, so getting exact numbers is difficult.

But Ippolito tried anyway.

He built an app that compares the environmental footprint of different digital tasks based on the limited data 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 typed into Google without its AI Overview feature.

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Watching an hour of Netflix, for example, uses more energy than a complex AI text prompt. An hour on Zoom with 10 people uses 10 times that much.