MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Category · 56.03.00
Environmental impacts
Description
"Increasing use of AI systems, and their growing energy needs, could also have environmental impacts. All of these could become more acute as AI becomes more capable."
From Future Risks of Frontier AI (GOS2023), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Subdomain
- 6.6 Environmental harm
- Causal entity
- Human
- Intent
- Unintentional
- Timing
- Post-deployment
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 subdomainHow other frameworks describe this risk
Other entries from GOS2023
- Discrimination
- Inequality
- Amplification of biases
- Harmful responses
- Lack of transparency and interpretability
- Intellectual property rights
- Providing new capabilities to a malicious actor
- Misapplication by a non-malicious actor
- Poor performance of a model used for its intended purpose, for example leading to biased decisions
- Unintended outcomes from interactions with other AI systems
- Impacts resulting from interactions with external societal, political, and economic systems
- Loss of human control and oversight, with an autonomous model then taking harmful actions