With Ella Butler, a postdoctoral researcher who worked with me in the Vitalities Lab and ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, I have published a new report. It provides a scoping review of the current literature on how generative AI tools are applied to living things and other elements of ecosystems and the natural environment.
The report outlines several areas where generative AI is being deployed in new research projects and industry applications. These include animal communication and agriculture and plant cultivation as well as environmental sustainability, biodiversity, climate change and nature conservation initiatives. The report also details some of the negative environmental costs and ethical issues associated with the manufacture, training and infrastructure that support generative AI and large language models more generally.
The report can be accessed and downloaded here.
Working on this scoping review made me realise that using generative AI tools is an ethical decision, given the massive impacts on energy and water resources and digital infrastructures demands involved in their data processing, modelling, training and archiving, as well as the carbon emissions and e-waste problems they cause and the rare minerals consumption that these novel technologies require. We should all think twice about whether we need to use these tools, as more and more digital platforms and apps are inserting them into their software.
As we say in the conclusion section:
The paradox of generative AI is that the technology is hyped for its promise in contributing to sustainability and environmental health, yet at the same time its manufacture, training and use all entail significant costs to the environment. The vested interests that may underlie major commercial initiatives to apply generative AI to ecosystems should be closely examined. The extent to which promissory narratives put forward in technology developers’ promotional materials may be yet further examples of industry ‘greenwashing’ (de Freitas Netto et al., 2020) in an attempt to make claims about sustainable practices, or are over-hyped to attract investors, require further analysis and critical attention.
As the language of ‘nature-based solutions’ implies, many developers and promoters of current or predicted generative AI technologies tend to objectify ‘nature’ as a resource to be extracted and manipulated for the use of humans to find ways of redressing the harms they have caused to the natural environment. As such, these discourses, imaginaries and practices reproduce a worldview that positions elements of the non-human world as separate from, and manipulable by, humans for their own interests (Lockhart et al, 2023; Lupton, 2023; Turnbull et al., 2022). This is an approach that completely ignores the ways that people are always inextricably embedded within ecosystems and disavows the multispecies relationships that are essential to human and non-human flourishing.
Photo credit: Mycena inclinata, Clustered Bonnet, taken in Trent Park, Enfield, UK. Stu’s Images, Wikimedia.
This Sociological Life 
Pingback: Generative AI in the ecosystem – half thoughts
I’m pleased to see your consideration of the environmental cost of using AI – the “massive impacts on energy and water resources” you mention – as we so often overlook this aspect of modern computing. It’s so much easier to press “like” and move on, not knowing or caring that those tiny characters add up, billions on billions each day. We need to push for gadgets that consume less energy in use, and adapt our behaviours online, to save what juice we can. In the meantime, I suppose the crypt0-miners churn out nonsense 24/7 in pursuit of their goal and the best we can hope for is that their waste heat is used wisely – if at all.
I agree Lee – thank you for your comments.