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MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 16.06.01

Environmental harms from operating LMs

Category: Risk area 6: Environmental and Socioeconomic harms

Open the MIT Risk Navigator All entries from Weidinger2022

Description

"LMs (and AI more broadly) can have an environmental impact at different levels, including: (1) direct impacts from the energy used to train or operate the LM, (2) secondary impacts due to emissions from LM-based applications, (3) system-level impacts as LM-based applications influence human behaviour (e.g. increasing environmental awareness or consumption), and (4) resource impacts on precious metals and other materials required to build hardware on which the computations are run e.g. data centres, chips, or devices. Some evidence exists on (1), but (2) and (3) will likely be more significant

From Taxonomy of Risks posed by Language Models (Weidinger2022), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).

Classification

Causal entity
AI
Timing
Other

Subdomain definition: The development and operation of AI systems causing environmental harm, such as through energy consumption of data centers, or material and carbon footprints associated with AI hardware.

Real-world incidents in this subdomain

Browse all incidents in this subdomain

How other frameworks describe this risk

  • Natural resource depletion

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Excessive water consumption

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Excessive energy consumption

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Excessive landfill

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Electronic waste

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Carbon emissions

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Biodiversity loss

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Pollution

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

Other entries from Weidinger2022