The last couple of years have seen a growing sentiment among some in the sustainability field. The idea that, despite its environmental impacts, AI will solve climate change has become a popular position in the AI/Sustainability conversation. A new report from a handful of environmental groups, including Friends of the Earth, interrogates this claim. Its findings indicate that while traditional forms of machine learning may have useful climate applications, generative AI lacks applicable use cases:
“Older machine learning tools that perform narrow tasks, such as classifying images, are not linked to rapid growth in AI infrastructure today, nor to the corresponding climate and environmental impacts. Rather, studies find most of the climate impacts will come from consumer generative tools, such as Copilot, Gemini or ChatGPT. At no point did this search or analysis uncover examples in which consumer generative systems were leading to a material, verifiable and substantial level of emissions reductions.”
These sentiments are in line with what I wrote back in 2024 about the state of AI and sustainability. At the time I wrote:
“There’s seemingly a disconnect between AI’s impacts and how it is being perceived by the ESG community. I believe that much of this can be boiled down to a definitional problem with AI. AI covers a lot of different applications and technologies. In the sustainability space, the technology is identifying energy inefficiencies, tracing supply chains, gathering disparate data from disconnected sources, and modeling the climate. This is vastly different than the generative technologies used by large language models like ChatGPT and image generation AI like Stable Diffusion. Those generative applications are largely the ones driving energy demand and the construction of new data centers.”
Conflating traditional machine learning and generative AI removes necessary nuance from the conversation about AI’s environmental impacts. Many tech companies have backed off their emissions reduction goals due to their increasing investments in AI and datacenters. Operating companies that want to reduce carbon emissions and use generative AI must think through the process carefully. The first step is determining how AI contributes to your Scope 3 emissions. Then comes the hard work of figuring out how to abate, avoid, or offset those emissions in a way that avoids greenwashing.
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