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The ethical concerns around GenAI services and how sustainable they are.
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In this video: Ethics and sustainability of GenAI
The development of GenAI raises complex ethical questions that need to be explored from a variety of perspectives that go beyond computer science. The intended use of an AI system, and how its use might affect our lives and jobs in the future is a subject of great speculation. We may also have concerns about how AI systems are trained, the biases they contain and reproduce, the accountability and rationale for their outputs, and the working conditions of the people who identify and remove toxic or offensive content.
A 2022 OECD Digital Economy paper observes that AI has the potential to help us make progress towards global sustainability goals, but that the computational needs of AI systems are also a sustainability concern. Two particular areas of concern are the power consumption for training and running AI models and the water consumption needed to cool datacentres.
Reporting in these areas is incomplete and not all datacentre operators are transparent with this data. Regulation tends to lag behind technological development but agreements such as the UNESCO Recommendations on the Ethics of AI and legislation such as the 2024 EU Artificial Intelligence Act may improve transparency in future.
