Do we really want to know the carbon footprint of generative AI?

Not to add too much to the collective global handwringing over the impact of AI, but as someone who both works in the digital/tech sector and is also a more traditional content creator, I did have a visceral, horrified reaction to this article about the carbon footprint of using generative AI.

You might think, quite reasonably, that as a writer I'd be thrilled to see people challenging generative AI from multiple fronts. Even better, unlike the often murky ethical arguments around when and how it's okay to use AI in generating content, attacking AI on practical grounds like energy usage and carbon footprint is more likely to resonate with the corporate decision-makers who might actually make a difference in how AI comes to dominate creative industries.

Imagine the scenario: the CEO or exec director wants to add a blog to the website. A junior writer costs £25k per year; a ChatGPT subscription costs £1k, and requires the same amount of supervision from a senior writer or editor. You can essentially get that blog written for free, and to be honest it's mostly there to boost your SEO so it doesn't really matter if a few AI quirks make it through. Probably nobody will ever know you decided not to hire that junior writer. Even if they do, is it really all that unethical to use ChatGPT instead of hiring someone? It's not like you cut jobs in favour of AI, you just didn't create a new one. Times are tight. You don't have £25k to spend on a blog right now.

(As an aside, my position on almost every business decision is that if you can't afford to fairly pay a human to do a thing, then you can't afford to have that thing — end of story. Your desire to have something is not an acceptable reason to take advantage of another person. But anyway.)

Now imagine, though, that the same CEO or exec director has to start paying for the energy costs of the model's every use — whether directly, or passed on through higher licensing costs. Imagine generative AI gets labelled as a major polluter. All of a sudden, using it conflicts with your environmental or sustainability policies. Either way, now you have no choice but to hire that junior writer. A victory for human content creators!

What worries me is that this alternative scenario relies on a pretty big assumption: that, whatever the carbon footprint of using AI to create content is, it's definitely more than the carbon footprint of a human doing that same work. Or maybe even more viscerally horrifying: it rests on the axiom that there is some "acceptable" level of pollution implicit in any piece of creative work.

Because that's what we're really saying with this argument, right? That using generative AI to produce content would be bad because it uses too much energy. And also, therefore, that using a human to produce content is okay because it uses an acceptable amount of energy.

Suppose, though, that someone decides to crunch the numbers about how much carbon footprint a human content creator really does have? And suppose they discover that generative AI is actually more efficient? I mean, you need to feed a human and heat their working environment — that's already a pretty hefty carbon footprint right there. In that same scenario above, it seems like the ethical thing for a CEO or exec director to do, from a sustainability perspective, would be to fire all the writers and use ChatGPT exclusively. (That might sound ridiculous with ChatGPT's current abilities, but in a few years I expect it will be an entirely plausible alternative.)

Even if — God willing! — it turns out that humans are still The Sustainable Choice, do we really want to invite that sort of calculation into evaluating creative work? Like, hey, this blog post was great, but you ate a steak while you were writing it, and turned up the thermostat instead of putting on a sweater — so unfortunately we're going to need to kill it and go with this other blog post that doesn't make a whole lot of sense but was written in a solar-powered coworking space by a person wearing recycled clothing and drinking oat milk. In fact, Mr Steak Eater, why don't you just not bother coming in anymore?

At the moment, of course, this is all very much a thought experiment, and perhaps a far-fetched one at that. But I'm really wary of starting to evaluate any content in terms of its carbon footprint, whether generated by an AI or not. It seems like a thread that we might very much come to wish we'd never tugged on.