Big Tech Says Generative AI Will Save the Planet. It Doesn’t Offer Much Proof | WIRED

Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this storyA few years ago, Ketan Joshi read a statistic about artificial intelligence and climate change that caught his eye. In late 2023, Google began claiming that AI could help cut global greenhouse gas emissions by between 5 and 10 percent by 2030. This claim was spread in an op-ed coauthored by its chief sustainability officer, and subsequently quoted across the press and in some academic papers.Joshi, an energy researcher, was shocked by the massive numbers Google was touting—especially AI’s purported ability to effectively cut the equivalent of what the European Union emits each year. “I found [the emissions claim] really compelling because there's very few things that can do that,” he says.He decided to track down its source. That 5 to 10 percent number, Joshi found, was drawn from a paper published by Google and BCG, a consulting group, which in turn drew from a 2021 analysis by BCG, which simply cited the company’s “experience with clients” as a basis for estimating massive emissions reductions from AI—a source Joshi called “flimsy.” The analysis was published a year before the introduction of ChatGPT kicked off a race to build out the energy-intensive infrastructure that, tech companies claim, is needed to power the AI revolution.A few months after it first stood behind the 5 to 10 percent estimate, in its 2023 sustainability report, Google quietly admitted that the AI build-out was significantly driving up its corporate ...