There is no such thing as “ethical” A.I.
As I was playing the new Fortnite update, I came across the Darth Vader A.I. that responds to what you say like Siri or Alexa would.
Before his death in 2024, actor James Earl Jones, perhaps best known as the voice of Darth Vader, signed over his voice rights to Disney when A.I. was first gaining popularity in 2022. While both Mr. Jones and his estate agreed for his voice to be used in A.I. projects, generative A.I. has a high cost beyond the potential for replacing human actors — it is environmentally destructive.
While the use of a dead man’s voice is an obvious and pressing ethical issue, there is the hidden cost of increased water consumption that greatly harms the planet.
Generative A.I. requires graphics processing units (GPUs) to expand quickly to function properly. As anyone who has built a PC knows, GPUs require lots of cooling. While most personal computers stick to fan-based cooling, the large-scale data centers that Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are building requires water cooling.
Microsoft’s 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report revealed that from 2022 to 2023 there was a 20.9 percent increase in water withdrawals compared to the 1.6 percent increase in 2020-21. This increase is directly correlated with the very large rise in demands for A.I. after ChatGPT’s release in November of 2022.
According to a report published by MIT in 2024, “[the] scarcity of actionable regulations for [generative A.I.’s] impacts limits effective oversight, inadvertently enabling rapid AI technology adoption without sufficient environmental and social accountability.”
The report— “The Climate and Sustainability Implications of Generative A.I.” — discusses the problems with generative A.I. on the planet and ways to mitigate it.
Generative A.I.’s environmental impact is progressing at a rapid rate and has been left unchecked by policy makers for the past three years, leading to the rapid growth of A.I. data centers.
As generative A.I.’s environmental impact has gone unnoticed and ignored, it has led to hundreds of thousands of people to engage with it daily, either unknowingly or purposefully.
In a 2024 survey done by Alexander Bick of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Adam Blandin from Vanderbilt University, and David J. Deming from Harvard Kennedy School, researchers found that 39.4 percent of working adults aged 18-24 used generative A.I. within a two-week span.
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman revealed at The New York Times’ Dealbook Summit that ChatGPT has reached over 300 million daily users.
People have arguably become too reliant on generative A.I. such as ChatGPT, and the consequences of it will harm the environment if action isn’t quickly taken.
Unfortunately, more attention has been focused on voice actors being replaced by A.I. counterparts.
The fear isn’t unfounded. Since A.I. Darth Vader has been incredibly successful for both Disney and Epic Games, there will surely be a rise in characters voiced not by an actor but by A.I. simply because A.I. doesn’t need to be paid.
Not surprisingly, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) filed an unfair labor practice charge against Epic Games on May 19 for alleged breach of contract and not consulting with the union before using A.I. instead of voice acting.
It drew a lot of media attention — attention that also needs to be given to the environmental impact of this latest digital revolution.
