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Exacerbating Climate Change

Generating Harms - Generative AI's impact and paths forwards

Electronic Privacy Information Centre (2023)

Category
Risk Domain

The development and operation of AI systems causing environmental harm, such as through energy consumption of data centers, or material and carbon footprints associated with AI hardware.

"the growing field of generative AI, which brings with it direct and severe impacts on our climate: generative AI comes with a high carbon footprint and similarly high resource price tag, which largely flies under the radar of public AI discourse. Training and running generative AI tools requires companies to use extreme amounts of energy and physical resources. Training one natural language processing model with normal tuning and experiments emits, on average, the same amount of carbon that seven people do over an entire year.121'(p. 40)

Other risks from Electronic Privacy Information Centre (2023) (21)