Good reasons to choose real intelligence over the artificial kind

It’s hard to do anything online without being bombarded with invitations to use AI, or artificial intelligence.  Do a Google search, and the top hit is now AI generated.  Use Zoom, and Zoom’s AI Companion can take meeting notes.  Use Microsoft and you’re invited to try Copilot.  Chat GPT has changed how we work, as have platforms that can instantly produce professional-looking custom graphics.

It’s all pretty amazing – except that artificial intelligence has a significant dark side: it uses a massive amount of energy, and produces enormous amounts of emissions.

Consider:

• Artificial intelligence is the product of massive installations of specialized computers in (typically enormous) facilities called data centers
• Data centers are the backbone of the internet so they’ve been around for a while.  However, they’ve only really taken off in the past two decades, largely thanks to the growth of internet giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Spotify and Facebook/Meta, and more recently to the explosion of artificial intelligence and the enormous computing power it requires.
• Data centers today use about 1.5% of global electricity consumption, or about two-thirds as much electricity as all of Canada combined.  That is expected to double by 2030.
• Globally, much of the electricity that powers data centers comes from coal, which results in enormous amounts of emissions.  A French study concluded that the digital industry is responsible for 3.4 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.  That’s more than any country in the world except China, the US, India and Russia.
• Data centers are one of the main reasons global emissions have not yet declined significantly.  Renewables like wind and solar are growing at a record pace, but they’re barely keeping up with new demand for electricity, much of which is driven by data centers.
• Data centers use so much power that they can disrupt local power grids, and new ones often are planned with new dedicated power plants next door (usually natural gas-fired, but nuclear is also on the radar) to power them.

The carbon footprint of an AI search is hard to pin down exactly; the internet is full of guesstimates (like ’10 times the energy of a regular search’), and data is scarce.  Plus data centers are used for a lot more than our Google and Chat GPT queries, so not all their emissions point back to our activities.  Still, it’s probably good advice to us all to try to use it less.

How?  Here are a few suggestions to reduce your digital emissions:

• Probably most importantly: if you’re doing a regular Google search and don’t need the help of AI, prevent it from automatically happening by adding ‘-ai’ to your search string.
• Resort to AI queries, whether on Google, Edge, ChatGPT or any other platform, only when necessary.  In other words, let your real brain remain your default source of intelligence, and rely on it instead of a faraway computer to discern hits and compile info.
• Limit your use of AI-generated graphics, video and audio, all of which use more computer power than a text search.
• Consider using an alternate search engine like Ecosia, a non-profit that uses the revenue it generates to plants trees (alas, their platform now has an AI search option too…)
• Stream less, whether movies, videos or music; because streaming is also a major reason for the growth of data centers.  Download anything you plan to use more than once so you don’t have to stream it again.
• Use lower resolution options when possible; smaller files mean less computer energy to send them.

One final note: all internet searches are governed by the acronyms of the search engine used, and therefore potentially vulnerable to manipulation (IE based on the politics of the day).  As well, it’s wise to remember that fraudsters and other unsavoury characters can be pretty skilled with computers too.  Both further reasons for caution online.

Generated as always without artificial intelligence.