Artificial intelligence today
Artificial intelligence continues to have growing influence on high school students and their world. From phone assistants to self-driving cars, devices have started to implement AI, including Siri on iPhone, Tesla and ChatGPT. Although the concept of AI has been around for decades, now it’s a student’s everyday reality. The AI program ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, holds the position of one of the most popular assistants. Academically, students use it for chatting, studying and sometimes dishonest actions.
These AI machines often provide better results than traditional browsing because of their human-like programming. They seem to understand our needs. However, all of this comes at a cost. The use of AI without regulation causes harm to the environment and to the community.
Effects of AI on the environment
AI, being as powerful as it is, consumes much more electricity than a more common supercomputer, which is used traditionally for most technologies today. In the worst case, the increased consumption can cause shortages in electricity, leading to more frequent power outages during events like disasters. More likely, for most of society, it will increase electricity bills in their homes.
Additionally, these machines consume more energy than supercomputers and release the energy as heat. To prevent overheating or even a meltdown, water is used to continuously cool them, allowing safe execution of processes and use of the technology. As a result, more water is used for cooling, corresponding with similar issues as electricity, with shortages and higher bills.
Among students and researchers, the excessive use of AI can dull core skills like writing, reading comprehension and general researching with proper citations. This can have destructive affects on their careers in the future, which can lead to weak arguments to outright misinformation in assignments, tests, articles, reports, etc. Can you observe this in your school or facility?
This usage of energy and water is detoured from the potential fates of people and environments in need of resources like electricity, water and many other opportunities. When searching for a subject on the internet, an AI overview may among the first results displayed. A popular example of this is the Google AI Overview when browsing on Google, unintentionally leading to users using AI and contributing to negative effects.
What the general public can do about it
To prevent such events, society can follow some simple rules and guidelines. When browsing to find the solutions for challenging subjects, students and researchers can use traditional surfing, using search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Not only can ordinary people contribute to helping the surroundings this way, our work can have stronger meaning with proper citations from trusted sources.
Although it is acceptable to use AI at while researching, studying, etc., communities should be mindful of how our use of AI to find solutions can cause problems for others and the environment locally and as a whole. If we want to have a larger impact on helping our home, we should start with eliminating excessive, unnecessary use of AI.
This article received edits by: Trisha Panicker, Kate Duncan and Victoria Byers
