AI’s carbon footprint is no open-and-shut case, according to scientists from the University of California-Irvine and MIT, who published a paper earlier this year on the open access site arXiv.org that shakes up energy use assumptions of generative AI models, and which set off a debate among leading AI researchers and experts this past week.
The paper found that when producing a page of text, an AI system such as ChatGPT emits 130 to 1500 times fewer carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) compared to a human.
Similarly, in the case of creating an image, an AI system such as Midjourney or OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 emits 310 to 2900 times less CO2e.
The paper concludes that the use of AI has the potential to accomplish several significant activities with significantly lower emissions than humans.
Source: VentureBeat
