AI Writing, Illustration Emits Much Less Carbon than Humans

With the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) comes discussion of the technology's environmental impact. A new study has found that for the tasks of writing and illustrating, AI emits hundreds of times less carbon than humans performing the same tasks. That does not mean, however, that AI can or should replace human writers and illustrators, the study's authors argue.

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Andrew Torrance, Paul E Wilson, Distinguished Professor of Law at KU, is co-author of a study that compared established systems such as ChatGPT, Bloom AI, DALL-E2 and others completing writing and illustrating to that of humans.

Like cryptocurrency, AI has been subject to debate about the amount of energy it uses and its contributions to climate change. Human emissions and environmental impact have long been studied, but comparisons between the two have been scant. The authors conducted a comparison and found that AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO₂e (carbon dioxide equivalent) per page of text generated than human writers and illustration systems between 310 and 2900 times less CO,e per image than humans.

"I like to think of myself as driven by data, not just what I feel is true. We've had discussions about something that appears to be true in terms of AI emissions, but we wanted to look at the data and see if it truly is more efficient," Torrance said. "When we did it, the results were kind of astonishing. Even by conservative estimates, AI is extremely less wasteful."