Researchers at the beginning of ai hugging face collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University and found that generating an image using artificial intelligence, whether to create stock images or realistic ID photographs, has a carbon footprint equivalent to charging a smartphone. However, researchers find that generating text, whether to start a conversation with a chatbot or clean up an essay, requires much less energy than generating photographs. Researchers quantify that ai-generated text consumes as much energy as charging a smartphone, down to just 16 percent of a full charge.
The study was not limited to analyzing the generation of images and text using machine learning programs. The researchers examined a total of 13 tasks, from summarizing to text classification, and measured the amount of carbon dioxide produced per 1,000 grams. To keep the study fair and the data sets diverse, the researchers said they ran the experiments on 88 different models using 30 data sets. For each task, the researchers ran 1,000 prompts while collecting the “carbon code” to measure both the energy consumed and the carbon emitted during an exchange.
The findings highlight that the most energy-consuming tasks are those that ask an ai model to generate new content, whether text generation, summaries, image captions, or image generation. Image generation ranked first in the amount of emissions it produced, and text classification was ranked as the least energy-consuming task.
The researchers urge scientists and machine learning practitioners to “practice transparency regarding the nature and impacts of their models, to enable better understanding of their environmental impacts.” While the energy consumption associated with charging a smartphone per generated ai image may not seem terrible, the volume of emissions can easily add up when you consider how popular and public ai models have become. Take ChatGPT for example: the study's authors note that at its peak, OpenAI's chatbot had more than 10 million users per day and 100 million monthly active users today.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/researchers-quantify-the-carbon-footprint-of-generating-ai-images-173538174.html?src=rss
