The second I came across the study, “The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans“, I knew that there had to be flaws in the study.
The premise of the study seemed weird from the start: What would be the point of it? Why is it that someone thought to compare the carbon footprints of humans and AI for generating images and text? What burning question was trying to be answered?
Is the argument to be that there should be less humans? The way things are going on the planet, that almost seems plausible – people warring and killing people could say, “We’re reducing the carbon footprint of humanity!”, get some carbon credits for it and feel good about their contributions – except if protests around the world are any indicator, that may not sell well.
The answer is likely that since people have been pointing out that the carbon footprint of generative AI is high, they want to be able to have a rebuttal. But there are some questions.
To calculate the carbon footprint of a person writing, we consider the per capita emissions of individuals in different countries. For instance, the emission footprint of a US resident is approximately 15 metric tons CO2e per year22, which translates to roughly 1.7 kg CO2e per hour. Assuming that a person’s emissions while writing are consistent with their overall annual impact, we estimate that the carbon footprint for a US resident producing a page of text (250 words) is approximately 1400 g CO2e. In contrast, a resident of India has an annual impact of 1.9 metric tons22, equating to around 180 g CO2e per page. In this analysis, we use the US and India as examples of countries with the highest and lowest per capita impact among large countries (over 300 M population).
“The carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans“, Bill Tomlinson, Rebecca W. Black, Donald J. Patterson & Andrew W. Torrance, Scientific Reports, 14 Feb 2024
What they don’t take into account – to the detriment of we lowly human writers – is that the physical act of writing so many words an hour is not all of writing. In fact, all of writing – real writing – requires the lifetime of sensory inputs as well as thought up to that point. Words don’t just fall out of humans.
This point is important because it’s also true of generative AI. Generative AI is certainly trained on large datasets, but those datasets have come from… where? They therefore inherit the human writer carbon footprint, which would be higher since they have stolen used materials that humans created to feed the training model. Further, every human involved in that process, as well as the maintenance of the system, adds to the carbon footprint. Then there are the materials in the GPUs, the integration, etc.
NVIDIA even has a page on the materials that go into GPUs.
So sure, maybe in generating a few thousand words – we presently call that ‘slop’ – it can do someone’s homework or help one write a monotonous study (they did use ChatGPT3), that carbon footprint might seem to be lower, but overall I’d say that it was actually higher than the average human overall.
Because we humans, in having our average carbon footprint, do other things that raise it: we drive to work, we use electricity to power devices pitched to us to increase our productivity, we cook meals, etc. All of that – all of that – is being added into the mix as if it has no value.
Before generative AI came around, nobody pointed at writers and said, “Those people just have this carbon footprint and they don’t do anything. We should create a generative AI that does it.”. In fact, nobody actually asked for any of that. Then, to have work written by writers sucked into a learning model to be used to generate text to create more slop – of questionable quality, of dubious value, being generated to spam the Internet with – and I apologize to real Spam – less nutritional value and taste.
AI art is much the same, I imagine, but I can’t really draw to save my life and have had the good fortune not to have to. I wrote something about using AI art in blogs that explains my usage, but I would never tell my visual art friends that AI has a lower carbon footprint.
The whole study seems funded by some company that wants a rebuttal to carbon footprints. It is, at best, very limited in how it views the carbon footprints of both we lowly humans and our esteemed ‘colleagues’, generative AI. At worst, it’s meant to prop up propaganda marketing for AI and the people who make the point that on top of the human carbon footprint, generative AI adds significantly more.
Unless, of course, this is a study to demonstrate that we need fewer people and we should do something about it – which some governments are doing right now, unfortunately.
@knowprose.com I kind of skimmed to the text, but the main point is that this is a stupid study with a terrible methodology. You have to consider only the INCREASE of carbon used when a person is writing. If you can't measure that, your study is faulty and it is a shame It passed through peer review.
That cuts to the quick. The delta.
Factor in that a meat robot is thinking of the prompts…
You made my day. That’s a perspective I missed. 🙂
I beg to differ, as I did in what I wrote – it completely ignores the raw materials needed for the GPUs, as well as the inherited carbon footprint from every human writer that they’ve trained it on.
LOL