What is it about?
Research on the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence started to grow in 2020. This paper describes the process of identifying relevant research papers and characterizes the resulting group of papers as part of a larger effort to describe the patterns and evolution of that research.
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Why is it important?
It turns out that it is quite complicated to identify the relevant research papers because (1) (Boolean) searches in databases fail to distinguish between papers on environmentally beneficial uses of AI and environmentally detrimental uses; (2) computer scientists typically publish in conference proceedings rather than journals and citation indices do not comprehensively cover conferences, and (3) the definition of negative environmental impacts of AI is ambiguous.
Perspectives
This "bibliometric" analysis of research on the environmental impact of AI turned out to be significantly more complicated than anticipated and highlights some very important aspects of coming to terms with those impacts. Research that neglects the challenges described in this paper will mischaracterize AI environmental issues.
Reid Lifset
Yale University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Artificial Intelligence’s Environmental Impacts: Exploring Research on “Red AI”, SSRN Electronic Journal, January 2025, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5311903.
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