Sustainable AI needs to accept economic realityArtificial intelligence (AI) is developing rapidly in an era in which the urgent need to address climate change is being confronted by anti-regulatory headwinds. These opposing forces complicate the pursuit of Sustainable AI, an ambitious goal that requires motivating private actors to reduce their AI-driven environmental impacts at the same time that the environmental consequences of AI remain highly uncertain. In this essay, I present a productive way to overcome this conundrum. Acknowledging the real issues that stand in the way of companies disclosing environmental performance and drawing practical insights from scholarship on voluntary environmental governance, I propose a Sustainable AI that shuns wishful thinking in favor of a healthy dose of pragmatism.
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