- The Guardian
- Issue #2187
If you’re still using the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, now called X, you probably know that there’s an AI service attached, called ‘Grok.’ Grok is named for a popular hippy term for deep understanding.
Users can use it for all the usual things people can use AI for. They can simply ask it a question. They can use it to produce a sexualised or even pornographic image of someone (that has been done a lot). They can ask it to manipulate video and so on.
Generative AI software is powered by large-scale data centres which use colossal amounts of electricity and water. There’s also a ‘Grokipedia’ which reports suggest mainly plagiarises from Wikipedia, but also makes mistakes, the ‘hallucinations’ that plague AI when it’s used for information gathering.
According to climate change writer and activist Ketan Joshi, communities around Elon Musk’s data centres have been fighting to get air quality regulations enforced in the face of pollution produced in the process of powering the data centres. He describes the volume of greenhouse gas emissions attributable to Musk’s data centres as “eye-watering,” running so high that they are undoing the climate benefits from people using Tesla’s cars and batteries.
6.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent was produced annually from a proposed fleet of 51 gas turbines to power Musk’s data centres. Once the centres are finished, they are estimated to undo the climate benefits for 35% of Tesla’s entire global fleet.
Since the growth in Tesla’s products has halted while the data centres are expanding at a rapid rate, the ratio between emissions avoided by people using Tesla products and emissions produced by powering Grok is expected to get far worse.
