Drawing water and draining power: How artificial intelligence affects the environment

Drawing water and draining power: How artificial intelligence affects the environment

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) over the past three years has prompted hundreds of debates over its use — to write papers, to automate tasks, to draft emails, to sift through job candidates.   People raise questions of hallucinated information, of lack of human connection, of illegitimate work turned into professors. Consistently, we see vague mentions of AI being ‘bad for the environment,’ but what does this mean? What does this actual…