Why AI is awful to our planet

AI uses massive amounts of energy just to generate a single response. The generators are really hot due to the significant energy and infrastructure demands of the ai data centers. Using AI is bad for everyone’s minds. If we rely on using AI for all our work, we’ll never know anything for ourselves.

Biases in AI

AI systems are mostly trained on the internet, or what people have written and created. Because of this they can reflect and even amplify human biases present in the data they are trained on. This can lead to unfair or discriminatory outcomes in areas like hiring, loans, and law enforcement. In an article published by Chapman University, biases are preferences for certain genders or races that can be ‘explicit’ or ‘implicit.’ In this article by IBM it says that “the people in those groups and society as a whole can experience harm without even realizing it.” When AI is asked to look at resumes, for example, it might automatically prioritize white male applicants.

Environmental Harm

AI is polluting our planet as well having a negative impact on people and our environment. The reason it’s bad is because they use massive amounts of energy just to generate a single response, so the servers answering everyone’s prompts and questions get really hot. The servers then need water pumped through them to cool them down and keep them working. According to an article by The Independent, areas in the U.S. with data centers for AI are experiencing problems with their water, for example, “Newton County, Georgia, which has reportedly suffered rising water prices, damaged wells, and is facing a water deficit by 2030 after Facebook’s parent company Meta, built a new data center there.” According to Forbes research, “ChatGPT’s daily power usage is nearly equal to 180,000 U.S. households, each using about twenty-nine kilowatts.” This is going to make electricity for households more expensive because AI servers and data centers are taking so much of it, and when there’s less electricity, electricity will cost more.

Threats from AI

AI can be used to create new cybersecurity threats through sophisticated cyberattacks. It can collect and process vast amounts of personal data, like user’s names, locations, birthdays, and even financial information. This raises significant privacy concerns. AI could also possibly scam people with the images it can generate, because it is very difficult to tell if an image is AI or not. An article from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) explains that ‘AI systems can malfunction when exposed to untrustworthy data, and attackers are exploiting this issue.”

AI Is Being Used Too Much

Why don’t people take this topic more seriously? Why do they continue to use generative AI, instead of letting their creativity flow? Even an important art exhibition of Van Gogh at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris has used AI, for an interactive experience with ‘Van Gogh,’ an AI bot paired with a video made to sound like him. Relying on AI like this is bad for everyone’s minds, because we can learn about Van Gogh without pretending to talk to him. Also having an AI video made the museum not pay for an actual video maker! When people rely more and more on AI not only for art, but to pass classes in school instead of doing the work on their own, they are hurting their own brains.