The expansion of AI has a huge environmental impact

The University of Michigan is proving to be the first campus in the world to create its own AI platform for the campus community and continues to expand its artificial intelligence tools. But officials are not sure what its environmental impact will be.

In September, the university announced that each of its students – more than 52,000 – will be given an AI assistant, adding to the school’s extensive AI tools developed in partnership with Microsoft. Resources are available to all faculty, staff, and students at the Ann Arbor, Flint, and Dearborn and Michigan Medicine campuses.

The September email leak raised concerns among some university staff and students about the university’s growing AI environment.

AI can have environmental consequences ranging from increased carbon emissions, more water and energy use to energy, cooling and storage of data centers that support the technology, and more electronic waste – although a direct measure of performance is not easy to measure. Some estimates suggest that generating AI uses 33 times as much energy to complete a task as traditional software, and it takes more than a bottle of water to generate a single email.

In the same week that the September email was sent, it was announced that operations at Three Mile Island, site of the worst nuclear disaster in US history, would be restarted in order to strengthen nuclear facilities. Microsoft data.

Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, Ravi Pendse, said that the university’s environmental projects to solve the climate problem were considered to improve its AI tools. However he said his office is not sure what the environmental impact of their AI platform is.

He said: “I’m not sure that they are still being read in the school’s proposal, because frankly all the AI ​​questions that the students do are not working in our data centers. “We are very focused on the projects of the University of Michigan’s environment and safety and we will continue to focus on it and support it as much as we can.”

Pendse said the university chose Microsoft as its partner because of its commitment to zero waste and zero carbon by 2030. According to its website, the corporation plans to cancel all emissions from when the company started in 1975 in 2050.

The organization also plans to return more water to pressurized containers worldwide than it uses by 2030. Some estimates suggest that Microsoft’s initiative could reach 50 million liters of drinking water per year to cool its growing number of data centers. It now operates more than 300 around the world.

Microsoft declined to comment on the power used to power UM’s AI platform.

“We want to make sure we only partner with vendors who fit our standards and performance goals,” he said. But he rejected calls from students to abandon the use of AI to protect the environment.

“Why not just use AI? Just turn everything off and don’t use AI? That’s not an option at one of the top research centers in the world because AI is here to stay,” Pendse said.

The AI ​​doesn’t move

In late September, the Michigan House passed Senate Bill 237, exempting large data centers from property use taxes by 2050. Environmental advocates say the bill could attract more data centers to Michigan, which threaten federal renewable energy laws and climate goals.

In a three-campus University of Michigan survey with more than 6,000 respondents, nearly 60% of students, undergraduate and graduate students and 40% of employees indicated that they have used some form of artificial intelligence. In the same survey, respondents in all occupations expressed concerns over the potential use of artificial intelligence and said they wanted more information and training.

Some students and staff felt the email Pendse sent in September announcing the university’s new AI assistant didn’t share enough about social, environmental and financial technology issues. The email informed the UM community that all students will be provided with an AI assistant, MiMaizey, and explained the ways in which this tool can help students. It concluded that Pendse encouraged people to answer questions and concerns.

Annalize Rowe, a senior in the School of Public Health, said the loudest message students hear from universities about AI has to do with the educational implications of using it to cheat or cheat. He said he doesn’t feel anything about the power he uses.

“It’s a challenge between, as students, finding the easiest way in your work, which is getting harder and harder, and fighting the fact that you’re destroying the planet every time [use AI],” said Rowe, who sometimes uses AI for data or research. “There are no warnings that come with it. Most of what we find out about AI is the manipulation and not its effect on the environment. ”

Ishana Kalra, a freshman with an undecided major, said it would have been nice if the email had included the negative environmental and social impacts of AI, how the university made its decision, and how much it costs.

“Because then we would have said, ‘Oh, we don’t need it if it costs so much.’ There was no student opinion about it,” he said.

Kalra says she uses AI tools about twice a week for school work such as coding, but she doesn’t think it’s necessary for the university to give every student their own AI assistant.

“There is enough in AI that we have enough in general,” he said. “I don’t see why the university needed to make its own [platform].”

Without detailing specific costs, Pendse said the platform is not “expensive.” Six full-time employees work on UM’s AI, which operates on a “pay-as-you-go” basis, where the university is paid for each query made using the platform.

Sophomore majoring in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Hailey Storey, said it would be good for the school to invest in more research opportunities or tutors for language courses, which many Michigan students must take to complete their foreign language qualification requirements.

Haelee Christmas, a political science junior, said she has never used Michigan AI tools and that most of her classmates use other AI platforms.

“I felt like Michigan was trying to have something else,” he said. “With ChatGPT, that’s often what students use to help with their classes.”

Christman said he had no idea there was an environmental impact from using AI.

Education on campus

Alex Bryan, director of student health at the University of Michigan, said that in his daily interactions with students and staff across the campus community, people “rarely” understand the environmental implications of AI.

“There is a huge potential for transformational change using these tools and new methods of machine learning. And it doesn’t come without a cost,” he said. “When we make these tools widely available to students of ours without sharing some information about the environmental costs of those materials, makes me a little nervous.

Bryan said he would like more education on the use of the technology, similar to how university dining halls have begun labeling meals with carbon footprint images showing their carbon footprint. how much

He said emissions from the school’s AI platform would “certainly” be considered under the Scope 3 emission assessment. Scope 3 emissions are a category of greenhouse gases produced by activities the university is involved in but not in direct control, such as transportation and waste disposal. UM is currently setting Scope 3 emission reduction targets, which will be implemented by 2025.

Pendse noted that ChatGPT, a major development in the history of AI, is only two years old and that AI methods will be stable and effective as they are refined over time. Pendse said the university’s use is small at the moment.

“Our usage, as we’ve seen, is so small compared to what’s going on in Microsoft’s data centers that I don’t think the University of Michigan’s usage even registers on their meters,” he said.

However, Pendse said that the criticism of not including environmental effects in the September email was “a valid point” and that if MiMaizey is released from beta and becomes a real product , the university will highlight the environmental impact.

“AI, in my opinion, will be one of the most influential technologies and a force for positive disruption, if it’s used responsibly, if it’s used in good ways , even if used thoughtfully.” That responsible and thoughtful use, in my mind, must include a conversation about it [the]the impact of these AI tools on our environment. ”

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