Speaker
Description
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to revolutionize industries, streamline decision-making, and enhance human-machine synergy, its environmental impact remains an overlooked yet critical issue. While AI promises efficiency and progress, its energy-intensive infrastructure—data centers, large-scale computational training, and ongoing algorithmic operations—poses a growing sustainability challenge. This presentation explores the hidden environmental costs of AI, drawing insights from recent research on discursive silencing in science communication and the sociotechnical imaginaries that shape public narratives around AI’s environmental footprint.
Despite AI’s potential to contribute to climate change mitigation—through energy optimization, disaster forecasting, and carbon footprint monitoring—the industry’s unchecked expansion risks exacerbating energy inequality, carbon emissions, and resource depletion. Through a multimodal discourse analysis of AI-related media coverage (2022–2024), this study investigates how AI-focused reporting addresses sustainability concerns. It examines textual and visual strategies used, identifying how dominant narratives prioritize AI’s economic and technological benefits while obscuring its environmental impact.
| Presenting author | Robert Radziej |
|---|
