Tech companies confuse traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when they claim this energy-intensive technology could help stave off climate breakdown, according to a report.
Most claim that AI can help avoid climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-intensive chatbots and image generation tools that are driving the explosive growth of the industry’s energy-intensive data centers, according to the analysis of 154 filings.
The research, commissioned by nonprofit organizations including Beyond fossil fuels And Climate action against disinformationdidn’t find a single example where popular tools like Google’s Gemini or Microsoft’s Copilot led to a “material, verifiable, and substantial” reduction in the planet’s heat emissions.
Ketan Joshi, an energy analyst and author of the report, said the industry’s tactics were “diversion” and based on proven methods that amounted to “greenwashing.”
He compared it to fossil fuel companies announcing their modest investments in solar panels and exaggerating the carbon capture potential.
“These technologies only avoid a tiny fraction of emissions compared to the massive emissions from their core business,” Joshi said. “Big tech has taken this approach and improved and expanded it.”
Most of the claims examined came from a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), reviewed by major technology companies, as well as corporate reports from Google and Microsoft.
The IEA report – which devotes two chapters to the potential benefits of traditional AI for the climate – presents a roughly even split between claims based on academic publications, company websites and those based on no evidence, according to the analysis. For Google and Microsoft, most of the claims lacked evidence.
The analysis, released this week at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, claims the tech industry has misrepresented climate solutions and carbon pollution as a global deal by “confusing” types of AI.
Sasha Luccioni, Head of AI and Climate at Cuddly facean open source AI platform and community, who was not involved in the report, said it added nuance to a debate that often lumped together very different applications.
“When we talk about Relatively bad AI for the planet, it’s mostly about generative AI and big language models,” said Luccioni, who has pushed the industry to be more transparent about its carbon footprint.
“When we talk about AI being ‘good’ for the planet, it’s often about predictive models, extractive models, or old-fashioned AI models.
According to the analysis, green claims, even about traditional AI, tend to rely on weak forms of evidence that have not been independently verified. Only 26% of green claims studied cite published academic research, while 36% cite no evidence.
One of the first examples identified in the report was a widely held claim that AI could help mitigate 5-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
The figure, which Google repeated as recently as April last year, comes from a report commissioned from BCG, a consultancy, which cited a blog post it wrote in 2021 and attributed the figure to its “experience with customers”.
Data centers consume just 1% of the world’s electricity, but their share of U.S. electricity is expected to more than double to 8.6% by 2035, according to BloombergNEF. The IEA predicts that they will account for at least 20% of the growth in electricity demand in rich countries by the end of the decade.
Although the power consumption of a simple text query in a large language model such as ChatGPT can be as minimal as running a light bulb for a minute, partial industry disclosures suggest, it increases dramatically for complex functions such as video generation and deep search, and has troubled some energy researchers with the speed and scale of its growth.
A Google spokesperson said: “Our emissions reductions estimates are based on a robust justification process based on the best available science, and we have transparently shared the principles and methodology that guides it. »
Microsoft declined to comment, while the IEA did not respond to requests for comment.
Joshi said the talk of AI’s climate benefits needs to be “brought back to reality”.
“The false coupling of a big problem and a small solution serves to distract from the very avoidable harm caused by unrestrained data center expansion,” he said.