Creating an image with an artificial intelligence would consume as much as a smartphone recharge or up to five liters of water. While “starter packs” or Ghibli portraits invade social networks, the question of their environmental impact arises more and more. Fastcheck checked the figures.
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Since Chatgpt has generated images, the practice has largely popularized. In just one week, Openai claims to have treated more than 700 million requests. His CEO, Sam Altman, recognizes that the servers of the “founded” company.
Behind these fun images hides an environmental cost. According to A study by Carnegie Mellon University (Power Hungry Processing) Codirigated by Canadian researcher Saha Luccionni, specializing in the ecological impact of artificial intelligence, generating a single IA image would consume an average of 1.6 Wh, the equivalent of a complete smartphone recharge.
Large quantities of water
Beyond electricity, these images also request large quantities of water. Data centers must indeed be cooled to operate. Result: between 2 and 5 liters of water would be necessary by image generated, according to the same study.
According to a French report of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (EESC), the training of a model like GPT-3 would have requested 700,000 liters of water. On a larger scale, theOECD Considers that AI could consume up to 6.6 billion cubic meters of water per year by 2027, double the annual consumption of Switzerland.
Little data, a lot of concern
Large companies in the sector remain very opaque. Contacted, Openai tells us “working hard to make our technology as effective as possible, including on water and energy”, but does not provide any precise data on the consumption of its tools.
In a report published in April, theInternational Energy Agency (AIE) warns that CO2 emissions linked to data centers could go from 180 to 300 million tonnes per year by 2030, largely because of the development of the generative AI.
Hélène Joaquim
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