This essay is cross-posted from https://thegreymatter.substack.com/p/anti-ai-bias

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"AI's carbon footprint is bigger than you think," warns MIT Technology Review. It’s a sobering assertion. As AI becomes increasingly integral to society, it’s crucial to weigh its costs and benefits carefully, ensuring we understand the full impact of its role. But before we all trade in our GPUs for abacuses (abaci?), let's take a moment to consider what this claim actually means.

Carbon Footprints

The article cites a study by researchers at the AI company Hugging Face, who calculated the CO₂ emissions of various AI tasks and presented the graph below to illustrate their carbon costs.

The study found that image generation models consume the most energy by far (that’s the rightmost box in the graph).

But this information, while interesting, doesn’t tell the full story. They measured the energy consumption of using AI to do things and compared it against… nothing. This makes AI look bad because there’s no context, no baseline. The lead author said in an interview, "Every time we query an AI model, it comes with a cost to the planet, and it's important to calculate that.” Well, sure—but you know what else comes with a cost to the planet? Everything. Literally everything. Every breath you take, every move you make (I'll be watching you), has a carbon footprint. The question isn't whether AI has a footprint; it's whether that footprint is larger or smaller than the alternatives.

Below is an image I generated with DALL-E 3 in a few seconds. Even if you don’t know much about AI models, compare the cost of a few seconds of computer time with the cost of driving to my local crafts store, buying some paint and canvases (which required carbon emissions to even appear on the shelf), and producing this. Or, if you want to compare generating this image with making it digitally, we could do that too. It’s a few seconds of human and computer time versus a few hours of human and computer time.

Researchers measuring carbon footprints. It’s common for people to talk about the carbon footprint of AI, but we don’t scrutinize other areas to the same degree.

I thought I'd have to leave things there, relying largely on readers' intuition, but I actually found a study that did the correct comparison. They compared the carbon footprint of using AI to generate an image versus a human doing it. They found that...

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