Week 5 Reflection

I have to be honest, thinking about the use of GenAI and all its benefits and drawbacks hurts my brain. Like many things in this world, there are always pros and cons. As Kali, a classmate of mine shared, think of electric cars. They are considered environmentally friendly because they don’t emit CO2; however, the batteries require mined materials that have negative environmental impacts. We can never achieve the ideal outcome because there is always something or someone who is negatively affected.

That being said, we can choose how we want to live on this earth and the footprint we leave behind. So, yes, we can choose to use GenAI, but to a certain extent. AI has infiltrated our lives in ways we are not aware of and have little control over. For example, face recognition on your phone, autocorrect when you are sending emails, movie recommendations, Google providing AI results to your search, and Spotify recommendations. You can try to eliminate it from your life, but it would require a lot of adaptations and isolation from society, as it is embedded in everyday things. How far are we willing to separate ourselves from society and its evolution to avoid using AI?

AI has been reported as an environmental issue as it requires large amounts of power and water (Western University). The question I have been wrestling with is: If I were to truly eliminate the use of AI in my life, how would that impact the world and environmental issues? How can I, one human among billions, who may use AI, affect the overall impact? Do I matter?

“Working from calculations of annual use of water for cooling systems by Microsoft, the estimation is that a person who engages in a session of questions and answers with GPT-3 (roughly 10 to 50 responses) drives the consumption of a half-liter of fresh water” (Berreby, 2025).

“Training one large ML model, such as Meena, is equivalent to 242,231 miles driven by an average passenger vehicle as far as carbon emissions” (Wu et al., 2022, p.2).

I think that, at the end of the day, if society wants to see positive change in the long term, the use of AI would need to be better controlled at a larger scale. For example, only so many questions can be asked by an individual per day on ChatGPT. Resources are not infinite and the rate at which we are consuming them needs to be reduced.