These are open questions! As you ask them, keep an open mind, and be ready to go “off script.” Your students’ answers may surprise you.
There is no question that GenAI is having an impact on our environment through direct energy consumption, indirect water consumption to cool data centers, and the use of rare earths and other minerals in the production of GenAI-specific computer hardware. But to what extent does this impact exceed that of other complex digital technologies, and what can the average individual do about it?
As an approach to these difficult questions, consider starting a conversation along the following lines:
- How much do you use GenAI, compared with other digital applications?
- How much can you tell the difference between an “AI-enhanced” piece of software and anything else?
- How much energy would you say that GenAI uses, compared with, say, watching a movie on Netflix or having a Zoom meeting?
To help ground these conversations, we recommend the website What Uses More, which lets you and your students compare different uses of complex digital technologies. These comparisons may surprise you! And yet, too, not all uses of GenAI are the same, and new models appear regularly. What Uses More deploys the latest available data, but the data always lag behind what’s really happening.
But these debates around resource consumption are not new—and answers from previous technologies suggest that the issue remains open for debate.
- How might we compare GenAI resource consumption with other environmental concerns, such as plastic consumption or fossil-fuel energy production?
- How much of the environmental harm can individual users mitigate by their decisions?
- Example: There is evidence that the bulk of fossil fuel emissions come from industrial uses in shipping, trucking, and air travel infrastructure.
- Example: There is evidence that the bulk of water overconsumption happens in industrial and agricultural use.
- How can our political system grapple with macro-level problems?