Bluesky

“Ithink AI will probably, like, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world,” Sam Altman said in 2015, the year he cofounded Open AI, the artificial intelligence company that made him a billionaire. But not to worry, he added: “In the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” 

As if to confirm Altman’s dystopian prediction, recent scientific research has documented that AI chatbots increasingly lie, cheat, and disregard direct instructions from humans. That’s bad enough when the issue is whether e-mails should be deleted; it’s another thing entirely when the future of humanity is at stake. In simulated war games, AI ordered nuclear strikes in 95 cases out of 100, researchers at Kings College London found.

Bill Gates has said that AI “will make it easier to fight climate change,” but more and more evidence suggests that AI actually makes it harder. “Our investigations have documented that Big Tech is now increasingly embracing the climate crisis denial rhetoric of Big Oil,” Geoff Dembicki, the global managing editor of DeSmog told Covering Climate Now. Scientific American has reported that Elon Musk’s AI chatbot has been spreading climate denial.

“Targeted AI has become a key tool in spreading climate change disinformation,” observes a report by the NGO Forum On Information Democracy. “AI algorithms can help craft highly personalized messages…[that are] more persuasive and [likelier to be] shared.” AI-driven microtargeting affects 34 percent of social media users globally, enabling “disinformation campaigns to outpace traditional countermeasures such as fact-checking or public rebuttals…. As a result, even authentic reporting can be misinterpreted or dismissed, contributing to public confusion, skepticism, and apathy.”

Then there’s the mind-boggling amounts of electricity and water AI demands—no small concern when rapidly phasing out fossil fuels is imperative to avoid climate breakdown. “A single AI-focused data center consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households,” the International Energy Agency has determined, and “the largest ones under development are expected to use 20 times as much.” Much of that electricity has come from burning gas, further overheating the planet. Heat released by the data centers’ processes also “create ‘heat islands,’ warming the land around them by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, and making life hotter for up to 340 million people,” concluded a new study summarized by CNN. Meanwhile, even as rising global temperatures are increasing the frequency and severity of drought, more than two-thirds of the thousands of data centers being built in the US have been in water-scarce regions, where each center can consume 300,000 gallons of water a day, enough to supply 1,000 households.

No wonder the AI boom is encountering fierce grassroots resistance across the US political spectrum—left to right, rural, urban, and suburban. For journalists, the breadth of that backlash makes AI’s effects on the planet much more than a tech or even a climate story. It should now be on the radar of newsrooms everywhere. A new Quinnipiac poll found that Americans by a three-to-one margin (65 percent to 24 percent) oppose having an AI data center built in their community. Their leading concern is skyrocketing electric bills. Indeed, bills for households in the vicinity of a data center have gone up as much as 267 percent in the last five years, Bloomberg reported.

Like fossil fuel executives, AI titans have long insisted that their technology is inevitable. That, too, seems not to be true. Some 100 communities across 14 states have imposed moratoriums on building data centers. Last week, US Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced legislation calling for a six-month nationwide moratorium to buy time to evaluate AI’s impacts on environmental, labor, and other issues, including AI’s ability to “create Big Brother type surveillance” of citizens exercising their First Amendment right to protest, Ocasio-Cortez said.

The AI boom, if it continues, is shaping up as a bust for climate survival. A few days after Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez introduced their bill, The New York Times reported that the AI industry, aided by former Trump adviser Taylor Budowich, plans to spend “at least $100 million dollars” to make sure the midterm elections go its way in November. Perhaps AI is not so inevitable after all?