Should the water sector worry about generative AI’s environmental footprint?

“Artificial intelligence and especially its generative variant is popping up in more and more places in our daily existence. The technology promises solutions to all kinds of problems, and we seem to be only at the beginning of a revolution. Many opportunities for application are also being identified for the water sector [1][2], and it is difficult not to submit to the temptation of all kinds of nifty large language model applications. Think of generative AI like a smart autocomplete on your phone. When you start typing a message, it predicts the next word based on what you’ve typed so far. Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) work similarly. They’re trained on massive amounts of text to understand language patterns. When you give them a prompt, they predict and generate text in response, creating coherent and contextually relevant sentences, just like an advanced, imaginative autocomplete! Both in science and in society, its use has normalised. But this comes at a price: a footprint in terms of energy, water and resources.”

(Citation: van Thienen Should the water sector worry about generative AI’s environmental footprint – IWA (2024)6 December)