Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone

Their work, which is yet to be peer reviewed, shows that while training massive AI models is incredibly energy intensive, it's only one part of the puzzle. Most of their carbon footprint comes from their actual use. The study is the first time researchers have calculated the carbon emissions caused by using an AI model for different tasks, says Sasha Luccioni, an AI researcher at Hugging Face who led the work. She hopes understanding these emissions could help us make informed decisions about how to use AI in a more planet-friendly way. Luccioni and her team looked at the emissions associated with 10 popular AI tasks on the Hugging Face platform, such as question answering, text generation, image classification, captioning, and image generation.