MEXICO CITY — From the White House and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, to Mexico’s environment secretary and former Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad Gonzalez, to our closest friends and even ourselves, we were all very much welcome by OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman.
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We earned this good will by generating more than 200 million images with a filter that simulated the characteristic style of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese production house founded by animators and directors Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki.
Attention was drawn to environmental authorities — of supposedly leftist presidencies — who, without criticizing or raising awareness, joined this trend. Yet the publication of images of deportations and militias in this same style showed that right-wing governments, such as those of U.S. President Donald Trump and Bukele, have found an effective way to promote a fascist aesthetic, as explained by media critic Danielle Cruz Villanueva and writer Gareth Watkins.
The publication of thousands of enthusiastic notes detailing the step-by-step of how to create a Studio Ghibli scene and how to explore the new features of Grok (X’s chatbot) was coupled with concerns about the environmental impact of generative artificial intelligence, especially its water consumption.
There is no standard or official figure of AI’s water footprint, but specialists say that it goes beyond the amount used for cooling data centers. Great concerns have also been expressed about the contamination of rivers and lakes with the raw materials necessary for the development of this technology.
This is especially the case in Latin American and African countries, where business elites have taken advantage of the lack of appropriate regulation to avoid taking responsibility for the resulting impacts.
Everyday activities
“The debate is no longer so much about whether we use it or not,” says Mariana Mastache-Maldonado, biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and science journalist.
“It is something that is already here and will probably be part of our daily life for years to come. I don’t know for how long, but it is a fact that is closely linked to our everyday activities, even for people who are the most reluctant to use it,” she says about AI’s imminent presence in our lives — whether making a query on Google search engines, sending a message on Meta servers or using mobile devices.
The bulk of the conversation has focused on generative AI, which use data-trained language models to generate text, images and audio. Yet the definition and applications of AI are much broader.
According to the Access Now organization, AI is “a computational system that can, for a given set of objectives, generate results such as predictions, recommendations or decisions that influence real or virtual environments. These systems can be designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy.”
Essential vs. non-essential uses
One of the fields that has incorporated AI is medicine. “There are many, many things for which AI helps society and the world at large. For example, detecting breast cancer or developing vaccines faster. There are many relevant aspects that are not related to generative artificial intelligence,” says Carmen Alcázar, political scientist and director of Wikimedia Mexico.
For Eugenia Islas Arroyo, a master’s student at the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca (UABJO) and a community and environmental activist, keeping in mind the complexity of AI is a first step toward a critical stance on its use and the political-economic discourse behind it:
“I don’t think they should be used by companies whose business is not essential. For example, why would the advertising industry need to be using artificial intelligence at the level it is today? It’s all about a marketing pitch for things that are not vital,” Arroyo says.
Really, as mankind, we don’t need artificial intelligence.
“Research has revealed that if we were to put together all the digital content that has been created since 1997 and store it on the highest capacity iPods, we could stack those iPods from the Earth to the moon two or three times over. In the workplace, AI is helping to accelerate to-do lists and streamline tasks. But that’s where we fall in one of the traps of the capitalist system: You never run out of work, especially when such jobs are designed to sustain the living standards of ultra-rich people,” she says.
Taking a similar position, José Andrés Velázquez, a journalist for Science and Environment, says it is important to question excessive enthusiasm for AI use amid an accelerating global crisis of overconsumption, labor precariousness, artistic dispossession and phenomena accentuated by digital environments, such as the FOMO, or the fear of missing out.
“Really, as mankind, we don’t need artificial intelligence. We don’t need an economic development as voracious as the one we are experiencing. The use of tools is inevitable, but we can decide not to follow a trend when we know it has far-reaching implications. I am talking about ecological issues, environmental impact and energy consumption. But there are also ethical issues such as plagiarism of the work of human artists,” Velázquez explains.
Malthusian and Darwinian postulates
Adopting a critical perspective is not only necessary to understand AI systems and their uses. It also prevents us from falling into ecofascism, which, according to the Observatory of the Commons: Water and Land of the University of Costa Rica, finds its roots in the ideas of Thomas Malthus — who argued that environmental, economic and political crises were the result of demographic issues — and Charles Darwin, known for his work The Origin of Species.
In the 20th century, Malthusian and Darwinian postulates were used by fascist governments — especially Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in Germany — to support xenophobic and nationalist policies. In the UK between 1960 and 1970, ecofascists insisted on an anti-immigrant sentiment. Books, such as Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, were based on the discourse that migrant populations had a higher environmental cost.
In recent years, ecofascists have been conceptualized as highly conservative, bourgeois, environment activists. Scholars such as Jason W. Moore have identified their ties to centrist and liberal environmentalism in which the right-wingers instrumentalize the struggle against the climate crisis to support their agendas.
Moreover, Arroyo says, one of the current particularities is moral superiority: the exclusive targeting of people who use AI tools without taking into account the links between capitalism, technology and its actors: “At any moment, we enter fascism when we do these condemnatory exercises of saying, ‘No, don’t let anyone make their Studio Ghibli image.’ We have to ask ourselves: ‘Am I really criticizing the otherness, the person next to me who is not a millionaire tycoon who flies around the planet?’ That’s where we go back down to where the capitalist system wants us to be, which is fighting against each other,” she says.
What is at stake
And what are the risks of falling into ecofascism in the current climate context and environmental crisis? One of them is the fetishization of technology: when technologies, their apparatuses and tools are dissociated from power relations, profits and material impacts on the world, as the American historian Moore explains again and as the environmental activist Arroyo details:
“The political and economic contexts in which AI is being developed are not being taken into account. All of a sudden, we just see the technological advances, but we don’t take the time to stop and think about who is funding the research and for what purpose. Artificial intelligence doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”
The promoters of artificial intelligence are currently big money.
In addition to this danger of an ecofascist stance, the Observatory of the Commons: Water and Land also warns against the aggravation of environmental inequalities and the increase of the privileges enjoyed by dominant sectors. This can come through the lowering of production costs, the advance of extractivist frontiers, criminalization, repression, dispossession and expulsion of communities. To put it simply: We are not talking about the responsibility of technological tycoons.
“The promoters of artificial intelligence are currently big money,” Mastache-Maldonado says. The biologist and scientific journalist reminds us that behind these companies are the richest men in the world: Elon Musk of X and Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Alphabet.
These assets, who belong to the richest 1% of the world’s population, have not only been singled out for the highest shares of pollution — 15% of cumulative carbon emissions and consumption of 9% of the carbon budget between 1990 and 2015, according to the organization Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute.
Lack of accountability
In her 2022 book Atlas of AI: Power, politics and the planetary costs, researcher Kate Crawford has also insisted on the urgency of assessing corporations, owners and shareholders of artificial intelligences in extractive practices and territorial expansions, especially derived from mining exploitation.
Writer and professor Jussi Parikka, from the University of Southampton, explains that this perspective allows us to consider the radical depletion of the non-renewable resources needed for the development and promotion of these technologies and, at the same time, makes more visible the way that corporate elites take advantage of it to avoid transparency.
From Mastache-Maldonado’s point of view, one of the advantages that the tycoons have found is the lack of adequate regulation, which has been a key factor in the relocation of data centers and facilities from the United States and Europe to countries such as Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Brazil and the Dominican Republic.
“Legislation is not keeping pace with AI’s growing speed and adding skills. And it is precisely in these legal gaps that these exploitative dynamics occur and also enrich the narratives that we as individuals, either due to lack of information or guilt, can generate, narratives that can slip into the fascism of demonizing the user and not seeing the platform that is supporting the Artificial Intelligence system,” Mastache-Maldonado says.
Sharing knowledge
In addition to being clear on which economic and political profiles are pushing and normalizing the use of AI tools (as highlighted by media critic Danielle Villanueva Cruz) it is essential that we rethink the discussions on the so-called “conscious consumption.” To this end, it is urgent to keep pointing out and demanding the responsibility of corporations and their owners for transparency and accountability regarding the impacts they generate.
“We also need to maintain a critical attitude toward the profits that companies are making from our use of AI tools. It’s not just us getting something out of these intelligences, but they are also taking that value out of us as users. Taking advantage from every prompt we give, and by causing an environmental cost which is a loss for us. We can act as individuals or collectively to try to mitigate all this,” Mastache-Maldonado says, echoing the comments made by organizations such as the Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (R3D – “Network for the Defense of Digital Rights”) on the exploitation and categorization of data.
We should aim to inform people — not to demonize the use of these tools.
In this scenario, the work of specialized journalism becomes key. As science journalist Velázquez says: “technological development is inevitable and it is where we are going. So we have to aim for it to be as harmless as possible. Companies have to make the use of energy and water resources transparent. But one must also be aware of what the implications are. And, considering it as a limited resource, ask ourselves if we really want to exploit it for trends or if we want to employ it in wiser ways. As environmental science journalists and communicators, our work should aim to inform people — not to demonize the use of these tools. Not to educate as an authority figure or anything, but from a horizontal point of view, of sharing that knowledge.”
For Arroyo, moving away from eco-fascist and technology-fetishist narratives also implies highlighting, understanding and supporting popular movements — particularly indigenous ones — that have denounced the impacts of territorial expansion and supply of AI services. These include the implications of data centers deployment in Latin America, droughts — such as the one currently occurring in the state of Querétaro, in central Mexico — the contamination of water bodies with so-called forever chemicals, the health issues caused by minerals such as germanium, the dispossession and expulsion of entire communities.
“We have to do something tangible to take away that power [the companies] have. We can’t just be thinking and saying things. We must be mindful of those other people who are risking their own bodies to defend natural resources and standing up to predatory tycoons. The idea is not to encourage individual blame, but there must be reciprocity,” Arroyo concludes.
