Benedetta Brevini

"Beyond Water and Energy Footprints: An Eco-Political Economy of AI for a Comprehensive Understanding of Its Environmental Impact"

Public discourse surrounding the harms of artificial intelligence has often been dominated by exaggerated, science fiction-like worlds where chatbots gain sentience, while artificial general intelligence threatens the human species. However, in the last six months, the public conversation on the harms of AI has shifted dramatically to include, for the first time, the environmental costs of AI. This shift is a result of the unprecedented increase in energy and water consumption driven by the rise of generative AI, making it nearly impossible for the industry to continue avoiding discussing this draconian problem.

Major digital giants, such as Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google, alongside various international institutions (OECD, 2022; European Commission, 2022), have finally acknowledged the significant environmental costs associated with meeting the growing demand for AI tools. Microsoft's most recent environmental report for 2022, following the launch of OpenAI's generative AI services, reveals a substantial 34% increase in global water consumption from 2021 to 2022, reaching nearly 1.7 billion gallons (Microsoft, 2022).

While this change in public discourse might be seen as good news, especially for those of us who have been sounding the alarm about the environmental costs of AI technologies for years, I argue that it is crucial to move beyond reductive frameworks that focus solely on carbon and water footprints. Instead, we must understand holistically the complexities of the environmental harms of AI. In various interventions, I have called for the development of what I termed an "Eco-Political Economy of AI" (Brevini, 2021; 2022; 2024) to address the complex factors involved in assessing AI's environmental impacts. This approach involves examining three critical segments of the extractive global production and supply chain of AI to account for its environmental costs: a) mining and resource extraction; b) consumption, energy use, and carbon footprints; and c) digital waste. In this talk, I will delve deeper into these ideas, presenting a nuanced elaboration of this framework. By integrating theories from media and communication, geography, computing, and engineering with indigenous concepts and environmental justice paradigms, the Eco-Political Economy of AI offers the tools necessary to place the climate crisis at the forefront of technology and AI development.

Bio

Benedetta Brevini is Visiting Professor at New York University, Institute of Public Knowledge and Associate Professor of Political Economy of Communication at the University of Sydney. Before joining the academy, she worked as journalist in Milan, New York and London for CNBC, RAI and the Guardian. She is the author of several books including Is AI good for the Planet (2022), Newscorp: Empire of Influence (2024), Amazon: Understanding a Global Communication Giant (2020), Public Service Broadcasting online (2013) and the editor of Beyond Wikileaks (2013), Carbon Capitalism and Communication: Confronting Climate Crisis (2017), Climate Change and the Media (2018). She is currently working on a new volume for Polity entitled “Communication systems, Technology and the climate emergency”.