Documenting AI’s Environmental Impact

Abstract

This tutorial aims to facilitate a much needed conversation on AI’s environmental impacts, and to inspire reflection on how the kinds of documentation that has been developed to support accountability for the myriad social harms of interest to the FAccT community could be expanded to account for environmental harms. In this tutorial, attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the environmental impacts of AI and limitations of existing approaches to mitigating these impacts. They will also gain insights into emerging environmental accountability practice through realworld examples including the use of IBM’s AI FactSheets to capture energy savings from hardware-aware AI models and the calculation of energy consumption and carbon emissions for IBM’s Granite model.