GenAI and Sustainability: Being Aware of the Environmental Impact of AI

AI is a powerful tool that we can use to create a better tomorrow, but what are the environmental costs that we are seeing today?

By Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning

There are some things in life that we might prefer to keep out of sight and out of mind, but our environmental impact is one thing that often needs more light shone upon it. One area that is especially out of sight, out of mind when it comes to environmental issues is our digital carbon footprint. Using a computer, being online, and especially our use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has a huge environmental impact. GenAI consumes more resources than other computing processes such as streaming video and cloud storage. Using more resources such as carbon (coal, natural gas, etc.) and water has both an ecological and economic impact. While the corporations and industries behind these resource-intensive tools are most responsible for reducing their consumption, we can each adopt wise practices for our personal use and be mindful of the tools we are using as we work towards a more sustainable future.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind – What's Actually Creating the Environmental Impact?

  • Data Centres: AI (and the internet in general) requires massive data centres for data storage and to operate our favourite tools such as Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT.  
  • Cooling Needs: Data centres need to keep all of their hardware cool (air and liquid cooling) in order to perform properly. Cooling pumps and fans are electrically powered. 
  • Training Hours: In addition to current operations, GenAI tools have had thousands of hours of training before becoming publicly available. All this training required large amounts of resources. 

Did you know?

The global AI industry uses as much energy as a small country and has greenhouse gas emissions comparable to the aviation industry. This data can be seen repeated in many of the links in this article, however; Business Energy UK has made a nice visualization of this data. To see some comparisons of the resources consumed in different pieces of technology, and to learn more about what you can do, The David Suzuki Foundation (linked earlier) also has an easy-to-read article on the topic. 

How Can I Be More Mindful of Sustainable AI Use?

  • Use the Right Tool: When it comes to GenAI tools there are so many it can be difficult to choose the right one. Versatile tools, such as ChatGPT, that can do a variety of tasks are appealing choices because they are like the “Swiss Army Knives” of the GenAI world. However, these types of tools use more resources than tools designed for a specific job. Let’s say you want to generate an image. ChatGPT can do this for you, but you may want to consider using a tool designed purely for image generation such as Microsoft Bing Image Creator.

* Speaking of the right tool for the job, if you are looking for an AI assistant to help you with course and assessment design, then consider trying USask’s AI Learning Design Assistant (ALDA). ALDA is a very specific tool that has a narrow focus on tasks such as course structure and learning activity design.  

  • Efficient AI Use: Asking a GenAI tool to do a large task will naturally require a larger amount of resources than a smaller task. For example, using Invideo AI to generate a video complete with audio is a huge task. Whereas using Microsoft Copilot to draft an email will use much less energy (much in the same way that, in a general sense, making a movie requires a lot more resources than drafting an email). Before turning to AI, ask yourself if this is a task that you can do without the help of AI. 
  • Batch Requests: Combine multiple ideas into one prompt. For example, if you are leveraging Microsoft Copilot to help you write your course syllabus, ask the GenAI tool to edit your text for clarity, conciseness, grammar, and spelling in one prompt instead of four separate prompts. 
  • Necessity Check: Ask yourself, do I really need to use an AI tool for this task? Many tasks can still be done without the assistance of an AI tool. You’ve written hundreds of emails before without AI, are you sure you need AI to proofread it for you? Or, that AI generated image might look cool, but there are plenty of free to use, Creative Commons Images (can be found on websites such as Pexels or Unsplash for example) that already exist for you to use instead. Encourage your students (and your colleagues) to use the “3 Before Me” strategy before turning to AI for assistance.   

AI tools are very powerful and can be excellent assistants. But we need to be mindful when we use them. Remember, our digital actions have a bigger impact than we might realize. The negative environmental impact caused by our digital habits might be out of sight, but let’s not leave it out of mind. 

Learn More:

Title image credit: Anastasia Shuraeva on Pexels

This article was created with the assistance of AI tools, as described in the GMCTL AI Disclosure Statement.

This resource is shared by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL), University of Saskatchewan, under a CC BY-NC-SA license. The image was shared by the Province of British Columbia via Flickr with a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.