Falmouth University’s decision to introduce a degree in artificial intelligence has sparked discussions around the university’s stance on sustainability, a topic which they have previously been very vocal about.
Mat Osmond is a political and climate activist working in the School of Art. He is one of the many people opposing the new degree, as well as criticising the university’s policy around the use of generative AI.
“It’s really important for all of us across the generations to talk together about what it means to resist it, at the very least refusing to have it in our university.”
The student-founded movement Stop AI FXU now has over 100 responses to their survey, with only two responses stating that they would like AI to be embedded in their degree, at the time of writing.
Their petition to ban the use of generative AI across Falmouth and Exeter Universities has now gained over 500 signatures.
Dr Jack Furby has completed a PHD focusing on human and AI interactions. He explains that AI development and training can be incredibly draining on natural resources.
“GPT 4 was estimated to use between fifty and sixty-two gigawatt hours of electricity just to train the model.”
This is equivalent to powering around a thousand houses for a year.
The United Nations Environment Programme states that AI infrastructure is likely to consume six times more water than Denmark, a country with a population of six million people.
The UN also states that while global data is still sparse, in Ireland “the rise of AI could see data centres account for nearly thirty five percent of the country’s energy use by 2026”.
These statistics have sparked worry and outrage from climate activists like Mat, who compares the acceptance of AI to a widening straw.
“If our digital technology has mostly been the development of an ever more sophisticated straw through which to suck Earth’s living resources and turn them into economic growth, AI is an exponential widening of that straw so you can suck more faster.”
Jack explains that despite the resource intensive nature of training and developing AI, there are only a few companies that have the ability to do so, and that there are more sustainable ways of training AI now.
“One way of making them is RAG, retrieval and generation, which is where you take one of these already trained models and allow it to have extra insight.”
This method lessens the impact on the environment.
While Jack sees a future in which AI is used more sustainably, Mat hopes to see a future in which there is a complete resistance to it.
“Perhaps it will make a space that is so radically unreliable, so radically post-truth, that we’ll have no choice but to turn back to each other.”
Falmouth University have released a revised version of their statement regarding their policies for AI to now include the impacts on the environment.