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Agence France-Presse

If you care about the environment, think twice about using AI.
Generative artificial intelligence used 30 times more energy than a traditional search engine, warned researcher Sasha Luccioni, on a mission to raise awareness about the environmental impact of the hot new technology.
Recognised as one of the 100 most influential people in the world of AI by the American magazine Time in 2024, the Canadian computer scientist of Russian origin has sought for several years to quantify the emissions of programmes like ChatGPT or Midjourney.
“I find it particularly disappointing that generative AI is used to search the internet,” lamented the researcher, speaking on the sidelines of the ALL IN artificial intelligence conference in Montreal.
The language models on which the programmes are based require enormous computing capacities to train on billions of data points, necessitating powerful servers.
Then there is the energy used to respond to each individual user’s requests.
Instead of simply extracting information, “like a search engine would do to find the capital of a country, for example,” AI programmes “generate new information,” making the whole thing “much more energy-intensive,” she explained.

According to the International Energy Agency, the combined AI and the cryptocurrency sectors consumed nearly 460 terawatt hours of electricity in 2022 – two per cent of total global production.
A leading researcher on the impact of AI on climate, Luccioni took part in 2020 in the creation of a tool for developers to quantify the carbon footprint of running a piece of code. “CodeCarbon” has since been downloaded more than a million times.
Head of the climate strategy of start-up Hugging Face, a platform for sharing open-access AI models, Luccioni is now working on creating a certification system for algorithms.
Similar to the programme from the US Environmental Protection Agency that awards scores based on the energy consumption of electronic devices and appliances, it would make it possible to know an AI product’s energy consumption to encourage users and developers to “make better decisions.”
“We don’t take into account water or rare materials,” she acknowledged, “but at least we know that for a specific task, we can measure energy efficiency and say that this model has an A+, and that model has a D,” she said.

To develop her tool, Luccioni is experimenting with it on generative AI models that are accessible to everyone, or open source, but she would also like to do it on commercial models from Google or ChatGPT-creator OpenAI, which have been reluctant to agree.
Although Microsoft and Google have committed to achieving carbon neutrality by the end of the decade, the US tech giants saw their greenhouse gas emissions soar in 2023 because of AI: up 48 per cent for Google compared to 2019 and 29 per cent for Microsoft compared to 2020.
“We are accelerating the climate crisis,” said Luccioni, who called for more transparency from tech companies.
The solution, she said, could come from governments that were “flying blindly” without knowing what was “in the data sets or how the algorithms are trained.”
“Once we have transparency, we can start legislating.”
It is also necessary to “explain to people what generative AI can and cannot do, and at what cost,” according to Luccioni.


In her latest study, the researcher showed that producing a high-definition image using artificial intelligence consumes as much energy as fully recharging the battery of a mobile phone.
At a time when more companies want to integrate technology further into our lives – with conversational bots and connected devices, or in online searches – Luccioni advocated “energy sobriety”.
The idea here was not to oppose AI, she emphasised, but to choose the right tools and use them judiciously.


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Researcher Sasha Luccioni says there is a need to raise awareness of the environmental impact of artificial intelligence


Researcher Sasha Luccioni says there is a need to raise awareness of the environmental impact of artificial intelligence.
