What You Can Do as a Web Builder on Earth Day

One easy thing you can do for the earth is not use “AI” tools.

Consider this as a programmer, web developer, web designer, copywriter, webmaster, etc. The tools include anything branded as generative AI, LLMs, computer vision tools, Copilot, ChatGPT, Bard, Grok, Dall-e, Midjourney, and so on.

If you are also a user who needs to use one of these tools to generate an image description or simplify the reading level of content because the author has created a disabling experience, I am not including you in this broad sweep.

I think Molly White summarizes the current utility of these tools quite well:

[…] they are handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern.

As a bonus, interns are powered by sandwiches. Versus pouring gasoline (almost literally) into the fire consuming our home.

There are plenty of articles demonstrating how ineffective these “tools” are for production-ready code. We know they encode biases into the output. We giggle at people who twist chatbots into giving them deals and screwing over their corporate masters.

But we generally ignore how much damage each of these requests is doing to our planet, our environment, and our future generations. Here is a very brief list of references:

• Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes, MIT Technology Review, 6 June 2019
• The carbon impact of artificial intelligence, Nature, 12 August 2020
• Some experts see AI as a tool against climate change. Others say its own carbon footprint could be a problem., CBS News, 26 August 2023
• The environmental impact of the AI revolution is starting to come into focus, The Verge, 10 October 2023
• AI’s Climate Impact Goes beyond Its Emissions, Scientific American, 7 December 2023
• Managing AI’s Carbon Footprint, Harvard Business Review, 10 January 2024
• Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret, Nature, 20 February 2024
• AI likely to increase energy use and accelerate climate misinformation – report, The Guardian, 7 Mar 2024

Other things you can do daily that are not explicitly about fake-AI:

• Try on the draft Web Sustainability Guidelines from the Sustainable Web Design Community Group.
• Use the Website Carbon Calculator as a tool to reduce your overall footprint.
• As a proxy to some larger impacts, you can use What Does My Site Cost? to gauge impacts outside of your home country.

Oh yeah, get off the blockchain too. I don’t know a competent, responsible human who is all-in on them, so I doubt I need to make that case to you, dear reader.

While I have your attention, can someone please make that Earth Day site slightly less inaccessible? Wow.

The opening image is my own redrawing of the memed “This is fine” panel from Gunshow by KC Green. The image of the earth is a composite from NASA. In this scene the rest of the planet, particularly the global south, is taking the brunt of the fire while North America is so far unscathed.