When Volunteer Engagement Can Destroy the Planet!

My most recent #200WordTuesday blog post created an ethical dilemma.

Last week a valued colleague was very quick to point out that my use of an image created by ChatGPT was destructive to both the livelihood of creative artists, and to the environment.

There was a conflict between my values of doing what I say I’ll do (publish an article on time – I needed to get an image quickly) and the impact of my actions on others and the environment.

So I did some research. Turns out:

• If 1 in 10 Americans (16 million people) write a single 100-word email with ChatGPT weekly for a year, the AI will require 435,235,476 litres of water*,

• Training GPT-3 took 700,000 litres of water*,

• Image generation creates the most carbon emissions of all AI tasks**.

Would you feel safe enough to point out an ethical dilemma related to someone’s professional actions?

Do you nurture relationships so that you are a person others feel safe to approach when you have potentially acted unethically?

And will knowing about the potential impacts of using AI make you take a step back to consider the ethical dilemma and make an informed decision about whether you will use AI, or spend that extra time or money?

#200WordTuesday #AlwaysLearning #ProfessionalEthicsInVolunteerManagement #CVA

Data from TechRepublic – ‘Sending One Email with ChatGPT is the Equivalent of Consuming One Bottle of Water’

*Washington Post reporting on the research paper “Making AI Less “Thirst”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models” by Mohammad A. Islam (UT Arlington), Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang and Shaolei Ren (University of California, Riverside)

**“Power Hungry Processing: ‘Watts’ Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?” by Alexandra Sasha Luccioni and Yacine Jernite (Hugging Face) and Emma Strubell (Carnegie Mellon University)

I also you encourage you to read AI Art and its Impact on Artists by Harry H. Jiang, Lauren Brown, Jessica Cheng, Mehtab Khan, Abhishek Gupta, Deja Workman, Alex Hanna, Jonathan Flower and Timnit Gebru.