Chaire Justice sociale et intelligence artificielle

Developing Standards for Sustainable Artificial Intelligence 

The world’s data centers currently require two percent of global electricity usage and
contribute 4% to global greenhouse gas emissions, with these numbers set to double in the next few years . Since we are only starting to comprehend and measure the impact of Articial Intelligence (AI) on the environment, its contribution towards this number is unclear. What we do know is that AI systems are compute-intensive, which increases the workload of datacenters, increasing their overall energy use, most of which comes from nonrenewable sources .

With the recent advent of AI approaches like large language models, of ever-expanding
scale and complexity, the digital divide in AI is only increasing, as it takes more compute and human skill to train and deploy AI systems. Despite this signicant growth, it is hard to get exact numbers on the environmental impacts of AI. Companies are decreasing the amount of data they release on this topic, despite AI contributing to a drastic rise in the energy consumption and emissions of companies such as Microsoft and Google in the recent year.

While some research and documentation on AI’s environmental impacts currently exists, the nature and extent of AI’s eects are under-documented, ranging from its embodied and enabled emissions to rebound eects due to its increased usage. The current project proposes to improve upon this, bridging research and application by developing new tools and standards to measure AI’s environmental impacts, as well as creating an international, interdisciplinary community of researchers around this topic.