Jon Ippolito

New Media and Digital Curation, UMaine

🐘 @jonippolito@digipres.club

🦋 @jonippolito.net

🧵🐦 @jonippolito

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Sizing up AI’s environmental footprint for your students–and yourself

LearnWithAI.org

Tai Munro

Sustainability Studies, MacEwan University

ConnectingWithScience.org

Land Acknowledgement

Image modified by Themightyquill CC by 3.0

Wabanaki elders Miigam'agan and gkisedtanamoogk

Agenda

• Environmental impacts of AI
• Introduction and experiment with an AI calculator
• Developing personal use guidelines for you and with your students or faculty

What uses more energy and water?

📝 Paragraph of AI text

🪫 Charging a cell phone

🎦 Zooming for an hour with 10 people

It depends…

Scenario 1

📝 Paragraph of AI text

☀️solar ✏️simple 📄single 🥶winter

💡 7 watt-hours

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🪫 Charging a cell phone

💡 20 watt-hours

​

🎦 Zooming for an hour with 10 people

☀️solar ✏️simple 📄single 🥶winter

💡 2000 watt-hours

Scenario 2

🪫 Charging a cell phone

💡 20 watt-hours

​

🎦 Zooming for an hour with 10 people

☀️solar ✏️simple 📄single 🥶winter

💡 2000 watt-hours

​

📝 Paragraph of AI text

🛢️coal 🧠reasoning 📚multistep 🥵summer

💡 6300 watt-hours

Scenario 3

🪫 Charging a cell phone

💡 20 watt-hours

​

📝 Paragraph of AI text

🛢️coal 🧠reasoning 📚multistep 🥵summer

💡 6300 watt-hours

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🎦 Zooming for an hour with 10 people

🛢️coal 🥵summer

💡 12000 watt-hours

“AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. Rather, artificial intelligence is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications.” (p. 8, Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI)

Natural “Resources”

Mineral extraction, processing, and transport.

Conflict, who profits, and displacement.

Image by Calistemon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Energy to power the data centres is inspiring both increased fossil fuel extraction and use and a growing interest in nuclear energy.

Dicklyon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Water for cooling at data centres and at the point of energy generation.

West Burton cooling towers by Richard Croft, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Online calculator

https://what-uses-more.com

Questions

Developing your Personalized Guidelines: Purpose

• Necessary or fun?
• Could I create/do this on my own?
• Does this already exist?
• Does it replace something that has greater impact?
• Is speed critical?
• Is this the right tool for the task?

Adapted from Simpson, E. (2025). FLO Friday: Climate Conscious AI Use - Wrestling with Environmental Impacts.

Image created from a prompt to Canva AI “Magic Media” Created Fall 2023

Developing your Personal Guidelines: Reusability

• One-time or multi-use?
• How am I saving or storing the generated content?
• How am I labelling the materials?

Note: Creative commons licenses and outputs of generative AI. A CC license can be applied but it only applies to the creative work that you contribute to the final product.

“CC Icon Statue” by Creative Commons, generated in part by the DALL-E 2 AI platform. CC dedicates any rights it holds to this image to the public domain via CC0.

Developing your Personal Guidelines: Impact

• Who benefits the most?
• Who is bearing the costs?
• Will it solve a significant problem?
• Will the data I put in be used for training? Intellectual property rights?
• Am I willing to use clean water to do this? Whose water am I using?
• If I had to pay for each prompt, would I use it this much?

Image by Joseph McFarland. AI generated robot. From Pixabay

Generating Personal Guidelines

Groups of 2 to 3: 10 minutes to share some of your key questions or insights based on your solo reflections

Consider:

• Personal versus work?
• What won’t you do?
• What will you do?
• Remember, actions can also include talking to others

Add your key questions or insights into the Google Doc.

Tai’s personal guidelines for AI use (for now)

Personal Life:

• Not using generally.
• Assess time savings versus harms when situations arise.

Work:

• Won’t use for writing emails, feedback to students, image captioning
• Sometimes use: Image generation, task prioritization
• Will use:
• To support students in developing AI literacy and use skills
• To generate reusable templates for student projects
• Always explore other options first, consider multiple uses, have conversations about the impacts, choose smallest tool possible, limit output length, implement batching

AI summary of the key insights document

Resources

What-uses-more.com

Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI. Yale University Press.

Tije, M. T. (2024). Lower your AI Environmental Footprint: 5 Practical API techniques. Tilburg University.

Simpson, E. (2025). FLO Friday: Climate Conscious AI Use - Wrestling with Environmental Impacts.

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