This year has brought a seemingly endless stream of reports and revelations on how best to use AI in marketing, media and advertising to save time and money. It’s an exciting time!
But, as with most efficiency-obsessed tech innovations, AI comes at the expense of humanity’s ability to continue living on this planet long-term. MIT reported earlier this year that the data centers training and powering deep learning models (like OpenAI’s ChatGPT) use extraordinary amounts of electricity and water, amounts comparable to the consumption of small countries, and there isn’t enough sustainable energy to power them.
So, how can we make use of these miraculous tools while minding both our quality of work and the impact on our planet?
Here are five research-backed tips for AI-ing responsibly in the media industry:
- Use old-school search engines wherever possible. Researchers estimate that a single ChatGPT query uses approximately five times more electricity than a regular web search. If you’re asking a simple question with a clear answer or you don’t need any new text or images generated, stick to good old Google or Bing. You can disable automated AI search results in your browser settings as well.
- Keep it short and don’t be polite. AI models use additional energy for every word they process, so don’t make them process unnecessary words. Phrase your question succinctly, and you can leave out the “please” and “thank you.” But even if you feel rude, just remember the Earth is thanking you.
- Ask your service provider for emissions data. Hold AI companies accountable for collecting and releasing accurate emissions and sustainability reports, and choose the most eco-friendly service for your project needs. As consumers, we have more power than we often realize, and we should demand transparency from these multibillion-dollar companies now.> Tip: Hugging Face, an open-source platform for AI data scientists and developers to share information, has already begun compiling a master list ranking thousands of language models by environmental impact. Check out the AI Energy Score Leaderboard.
- Run AI-powered emissions analyses to eliminate waste in media planning. AI can help analyze programmatic supply chains to reduce unnecessary intermediaries that contribute to higher emissions in digital advertising. Minimizing data processing and server usage, especially for things like made-for-advertising sites prevents waste, both environmental and financial.
- Use AI to enhance, not replace, human abilities. While it may be tempting to drastically reduce time and labor costs by having AI write emails for you, create ads, plan your media campaign and report everything, you’re setting yourself up for poor quality. Remember, efficiency does not equal effectiveness. Advertisers who use AI as an “extra set of eyes,” or an enhancer of their own creative abilities, rather than a replacement, will produce work that stands out and wins business against the sea of AI slop. (Not to mention, they’ll be the ones “enhancing our ability” to continue living on Earth.)
There is some good news from the intersection of AI and climate change, too: Google’s deep learning tool GNoME – or Graph Networks for Materials Exploration – has discovered 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials than could cleanly power future technologies like semiconductors, supercomputers and electric vehicles. This single discovery is equivalent to 800 years’ worth of human knowledge. So the future isn’t all doom and gloom; it just depends on how we use this powerful technology.
And as media industry professionals, we hold a unique power to drive culture and set an example for the public at large of how to be good citizens of Earth, even with supercomputers at our fingertips.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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