Commentary on AI: regardless of losses
The AI boom has high environmental costs. Parallels with the environmentally damaging greed of former gold diggers are clear and alarming, says Wilhelm Drehling.
When there's a gold rush, it's not the gold diggers who profit, but those who sell shovels - there's no better way to summarize the situation in the current AI world. Everyone wants to use AI and beat it in somewhere. Much to the advantage of a company like Nvidia, which provides the majority of the hardware required and has thus risen rocket-fast to the top of the world's most valuable companies.
Of course, the hype is huge and there are areas in which AI makes perfect sense. For example, the offline instance of OpenAI's Whisper is great, transcribing interviews in no time at all. But AI has its downsides, which are all too often ignored or glossed over.
Just like in the Klondike, some people lose all sense of decency and, with dollar signs in their eyes, fail to see the copyright and data protection violations they are committing. For example, with image generators that scan the entire Internet for images, categorize them and thus not only make life difficult for artists, but also steal their art. With language models that reuse all input for training. Or with web scrapers that crawl the internet and don't even stop at sites that don't want to.
In addition, in the AI gold rush, dubious start-ups are flooding the market with pointlessly expensive products, sticking a big AI logo on them and promising the revolution that will save the world. After blockchain, Web3 and NFTs, investors have to burn their millions somewhere.
All these unnecessary AI projects are also very damaging to the environment: AIs are energy-hungry creatures that devour electricity and water. This consumption will not stop any time soon, on the contrary, it will continue to increase. As two papers fear, AIs could consume as much water as four to six Denmarks and as much electricity as the entire Netherlands by 2027. For example, training Chat-GPT3 alone consumed 700,000 liters of water. It's like when gold diggers cut down forests and polluted rivers in their greed. It simply cannot be that 128 years later the same mistakes are being made again just so that you can generate a golden image with two sentences. This has to stop.
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(wid)
