Generative AI awareness soars, but environmental concerns grow

And 45% of people who are aware of GenAI want laws that require companies to be transparent about the environmental and climate change impact of their GenAI systems.

Environmental concerns are growing because GenAI systems rely on data centres that continue to burn fossil fuels and increase carbon emissions.

The survey of 1,000 UK consumers by technology PR company CloudNine PR suggests that 54% of UK adults who are familiar with GenAI are also aware that its expansion could be harmful to the environment and contribute to global warming. Nearly one in five (19%) don't trust GenAI providers (including the likes of ChatGPT) to act responsibly to manage and reduce their environmental impact.

Around 10% of those who already regularly use GenAI tools agreed they would be willing to pay a little more to use products and services that use GenAI technology if the additional money is spent on making the technology more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly.

GenAI technology is highly energy-intensive and there are concerns that its rapid adoption is increasing the demand for power-hungry data centres. For example, research by Morgan Stanley indicates that power demand from Generative AI will increase by around 70% every year until 2027, accelerating the need for data centre capacity. And by 2027, Generative AI could use as much energy as Spain needed to power itself in 2022.

GenAI systems consume electricity by drawing on the computational power in the thousands of computer servers housed in data centres that support them – both in training the large language models (LLMs) they depend on, and every time a user query or task is processed by a GenAI tool or app.

Processing a single GenAI request (such as a ChatGPT task) is estimated to use around 10x more electricity than a simple Google search, for example. This means that replacing the world’s nine billion daily Google searches with GenAI requests would increase the electricity demand by an amount similar to the annual consumption of around 1.5 million European Union residents.

However, the predicted increases in energy consumption and potential environmental cost of GenAI systems could be reduced if the technology industry and regulators step in to address the issue. There are signs that this is starting to happen.

Leading technology firms such as Salesforce are supporting legislation that would require companies to use standardised measurement methods for reporting the carbon emissions and environmental impact of AI systems.

In February, US Democratic lawmakers introduced the Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act of 2024, a bill aimed at creating agreed standards to measure and report the full range of AI’s impact on the environment, as well as creating a voluntary framework for AI developers to report the impacts.

Legislation like this could further incentivise the big tech brands and data centre operators to follow the advice of experts who suggest it’s possible to reduce the carbon footprint of AI (by investing in energy-efficient servers and storage devices, using environmentally-friendly data centre cooling methods and switching to renewable energy for example).

“Generative AI has huge potential to make our lives better, but there is a race against time to make it more sustainable before it gets out of control,” said Uday Radia, owner of CloudNine PR. “Our survey indicates that consumers are starting to recognise this challenge. And while our actions as individual users may seem insignificant, more than a third (35%) of those familiar with GenAI believe it would be helpful if tools such as ChatGPT reminded users about their environmental impact every time they logged in – to encourage more responsible usage.”

*Combining respondents who selected: “I am aware of at least one of them, but I have never tried using them”, or “I am aware of and have tried using at least one of them” or “I am aware of and use at least one them regularly”

About the survey

Cloudnine PR commissioned market research company Censuswide to conduct a survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,000 UK consumers to assess their awareness of Generative AI and its impact on the environment. The data was collected between 20th and 23rd August, 2024. Censuswide abides by and employs members of the Market Research Society and follows the MRS code of conduct and ESOMAR principles. Censuswide is also a member of the British Polling Council.