Remember NFTs? No, we hardly do either. Just as quickly as they exploded into the metaverse and had photographers left, right and center making their mark, they seem to have vanished without a trace.
For months, it felt like all we posted about was how people were selling NFTs, photographers getting backlash for selling NFTs, and companies like Instagram planning to launch their own NFT platform. But now it seems the hype has been replaced by AI technology that just looks like it’s here to stay.
NFTs flopping spectacularly was almost inevitable; nothing with that much hype or buzz ever lasts (except maybe texting), and if it does, people usually understand what it is. I’m pretty sure the average Joe never quite knew what an NFT is/was, which is hardly surprising considering they are so difficult to explain. When NFTs started to take off, there was a lot of talk about the environmental impacts due to the energy-intensive process.
NFTs went mainstream almost overnight thanks to Beeple’s collage, The first 5000 days which sold for a staggering $69 million. Since then, photographers, news agencies, even the founder of Twitter found that there was money to be made in selling NFTs, and just like that, they were everywhere.
• Read more: What are NFTs? (opens in a new tab)
Both NFTs and AI require massive amounts of electricity to power the computers running blockchain technology and machine learning. Since both use mostly non-renewable energy, both practices have a significant carbon footprint that is easy to forget. Last year it was reported that a single NFT transaction (opens in a new tab) has a carbon footprint of around 48 kg CO2 – that’s the same as driving 142 km in a small petrol car. In 2022, just under 10 million US adults shopped for NFTs (which means minted and sold), so that’s a lot of road trips and the rest of the world hasn’t even been considered.
AI and NFT may be two very different things, but both exist within the metaverse and share many similar concerns, including carbon emissions. According to a technology review, the global technology sector is responsible for 1.8 – 3.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions. While AI’s carbon footprint is a small percentage of the total, it’s still very high for a single sector of the tech industry, and it’s only likely to get bigger.
Just six months ago, very few people had access to AI generator sites, but now they are free for anyone to use (although you may need to buy extra credits or a subscription if you use it a lot) and the volume of content that is sent out every the day is astronomical. DALL-E•2 has now removed the waiting list, and in September 2022, Open AI reported that it was sending out around 2 million images every day. You only need to be on Midjourney for a short time to experience how quickly content is created – it only takes 2 minutes to generate several different versions and an upscaled, high-resolution version of your request. With so many different channels and thousands of creators, I can’t begin to fathom what the frame output per minute would be.
Advances in AI are made daily, machine learning is becoming more intelligent and the speed at which content is created is increasing exponentially. It’s easy to get wrapped up in how new and exciting AI is, but let’s not forget that it has its consequences. If it is to become normal to use artificial intelligence in everyday life, we must find ways to reduce carbon emissions. Switching to renewable energy to power the servers and computers needed to run AI would be a big step in the right direction.
AI may even help us understand weather data better so we can set up renewable energy farms more efficiently, but until then we should be aware of the environmental impacts of these ever-changing technological advances. While it’s fun to push the boundaries of your imagination with text-to-image generators or find out how convincing Chat GPT can be, it’s not entirely guilt-free fun. Lots of computing required huge amounts of energy, and until we can run these data centers entirely on renewable energy, your creations have a carbon footprint.
