The Environmental Impact of Your Chatbot Habit – Why it Might Be Time to Say Bye to the AI

Here’s a question; how much water do you think a single query of ChatGPT consumes? What about Carbon Emissions? How many round trip flights between New York and San Francisco equal the Co2 emitted by training one Large Language Model? And maybe this is the most important one – how would you even figure those numbers out when the big AI companies don’t make them public?

Concerns about AI’s impact on Climate Change aren’t new, but as extreme weather events like the floods in North Carolina and the wild fires in L.A. become more and more frequent, a lot of us are wondering just how much blame we should lay at AI’s doorstep. How can we make sure that we take our planet into account while continuing to develop this technology?

To help us understand the real cost of all our ChatGPT queries and Dall-E diversions, we’re talking to two women who are both fighting for more transparency around these very questions. Dr. Sasha Luccioni, the Climate Lead at AI company Hugging Face, has chosen to fight for more sustainable AI from within an AI company. On the other hand, Yoca Arditi-Rocha, executive director at the CLEO Institute is deeply skeptical that businesses will choose to put the planet above profit on their own accord. 

Can an Insider approach lead to climate-safe AI? Or is it up to activists and outsiders to make sure that all those AI prompts we thought were saving us so much time don’t end up meaning our planet’s time is up that much sooner.

For more check out Dr. Luccioni…

On Bluesky – @sashamtl.bsky.social

On X – @SashaMTL

On LinkedIn – /sashaluccioniphd

And for more from Yoca and the CLEO Institute find them…

On X – @Yoca1000 | @CLEOInstitute

On Instagram – @cleoinstitute

On Facebook – /CLEOInstitute

On LinkedIn – /yocamille | /the-cleo-institute

On the Web – cleoinstitute.org

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Our guests contribute to this podcast in their personal capacity. The views expressed in this interview are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology or its employees (“AnitaB.org”). AnitaB.org is not responsible for and does not verify the accuracy of the information provided in the podcast series. The primary purpose of this podcast is to educate and inform. This podcast series does not constitute legal or other professional advice or services.

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