UK public oblivious to AI energy use – IET report

The study, commissioned ahead of ChatGPT’s second birthday, revealed that just 16 per cent of the public was aware of the environmental impacts of the large language models (LLMs) that power much of today’s AI. 

It’s been estimated that a single ChatGPT query consumes between 10 and 30 times the energy of a traditional internet search. Despite this, many people are using LLMs to answer basic questions such as ‘what is one plus one’, ‘what day is it’, and ‘what is the weather’. According to the IET, rudimentary online search should be used for these basic questions, with AI tools better suited to more complex tasks such as helping people write emails and documents.

“We’ve seen a colossal uptake of AI tools in the past two years, and while LLMs can provide great support to users, there is significant cost and environmental impact, which is only going to increase as the adoption of AI rises to drive efficiency and productivity,” said Professor Peter Bannister, chair of the IET’s Sustainability and Net Zero Policy Centre.

“For the public, there are ways to reduce the environmental impact straight away, such as asking if you really need to use these platforms – can you find this information another way? If you do use a LLM tool, think about the prompts or queries you are inputting – provide as much detail as possible to reduce inaccuracies or needing to redo the request. It’s good to remember that LLMs aren’t search engines, they’re intended to help with writing documents and large pieces of text.”

According to research recently published by the Washington Post and the University of California, ChatGPT consumes just over one 500ml bottle of water per 100-word request. The IET found that nearly one third of people are oblivious to AI’s water use. However, 60 per cent of survey respondents said they would alter their behaviour after being made aware of AI’s environmental footprint.

The IET said that regulators must look to limit the climate impact of LLMs, alongside addressing AI's potential misuse and any threat it may pose to humanity. 

“This could include a bronze, silver, gold standard for the approval of new data centres – which support AI servers – in the UK, based on a sustainability rating,” said Dr Graham Herries, chair of the IET’s Digital Futures Policy Centre.

“Current data centres are unsustainable without greener infrastructure, so we need to see government support for green technologies by building sustainability into appropriate regulation of new and expanding technologies.

“Training new AI models is also very costly and inefficient with each new model requiring training from scratch. We need to see alternative methods for new AI models to learn more effectively and encourage greater re-use of this learning. This isn’t an easy task, but we need sustainable innovation to be the future.”