The human factor | The hidden side of virtual figurines

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Posted at 8:00 p.m.

“On social networks, I see virtual figurines pass (starter packs), generated by artificial intelligence. Does creating this kind of images have a strong environmental impact? Asked Émilie.

If you provide your name, an image of you and two or three objects that characterize you, in a few seconds, Chatgpt will create an image of a figurine of yourself accompanied by all its accessories, similar to a toy that could be found in a store.

These images generated by artificial intelligence (AI) invaded the canvas at the beginning of April, in the wake of those imitating the style of Ghibli studios – the Japanese studio causing animated films My neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoké or Chihiro’s journey.Read the article “Chatgpt now capable of creating images inspired by the Ghibli studio”

These trends were pushed by Openai, the company behind Chatgpt, to show the full potential of its new feature to generate images.

And it works. In early April, in just 48 hours, more than 700 million images were generated by more than 130 million users, according to number two of the company, Brad Lightcap.

In response, designers and illustrators protested by publishing online starter packs Made without AI, with the keyword #starterpacknoai. And several personalities have also started to sound the alarm on the environmental impact of these trends.

“Behind magic, there is a reality that we often forget to look: the environmental cost of these technologies,” wrote French astronaut Thomas Pesquet on his social networks.

Since then, several articles have been published in the media, evoking the number of liters of water used to cool the servers to generate each image, the amount of electricity consumed by them, or the amount of greenhouse gases generated.

But in fact, “we cannot really estimate the impact of such a trend,” said Sasha Luccioni, climate manager at Hugging Face, a platform that wishes to democratize artificial intelligence thanks to free access technologies.

A very difficult impact to estimate

The expert published last June an article estimating the energy consumption of artificial intelligence models generating text or images.

The most energy -consuming were by far those who generated images. The worst requested the equivalent of half of the load of a cell phone to produce a single image; and generate 1000 images was to emit 1.6 kg of equivalent CO₂ – about 7 km traveled by car.

It is nevertheless a study carried out on open models, which can be downloaded and tested by researchers – which is not the case with chatgpt, which is based on a so -called “closed” model, therefore completely opaque for those who wish to assess its performance.

“But as it generates rather high quality images, one can imagine that it is rather on the upper part of the spectrum. It is probably a very large model that is used underlying, ”says the researcher.

The amount of energy required to generate a starter pack could therefore be the double, the triple or the fivefold of what it has found for open models – or more.

“It is impossible to know it, since they do not say how their model works, on how many images they train it, etc. », Use Sasha Luccioni deplores.

Same thing for water consumption used by servers, or for the amount of greenhouse gases generated.

A slippery slope

Whether it is a half-load of telephone or a dozen, on a single-image scale, it may seem relatively little. But when we talk about hundreds of millions of requests, as for these viral trends, this can represent a amount of colossal energy.

“And as these companies give absolutely no environmental information, people are not aware of the cost that it represents,” deplores Sasha Luccioni.

Because of this lack of transparency on the part of web giants, it is impossible for everyone to make enlightened choices towards their use of AI-unlike the use of the car or the consumption of meat, for which we can calculate orders of energy size, greenhouse gases or the quantity of water they represent.

Also, these resources are consumed “far from us”, so it is difficult to realize this impact.

“If we saw the battery of our phone decrease by half when we generate an image, it would help us to think before doing so,” said the researcher.

His advice is not necessarily to completely stop using tools like Chatgpt, but rather to think about this reflex of systematically turning by default towards AI “for everything and anything”.

“People sometimes use chatgpt on a daily basis to have fun and generate images, to look for recipe ideas, to answer questions … or even as a calculator,” says the researcher.

“Couldn’t we do otherwise?” »»