| | Friday reading: AI and more AI
Google emissions rise posing questions about energy cost of AI
Google has published its 2024 Environmental Report, an overview of its environmental sustainability strategy, targets, and annual progress towards them - and the section about AI makes for particularly interesting reading.
Google has headlined this part of the report as "AI for sustainability", clearly keen to position itself not just as mitigating the negative impacts of AI on the environment but also channelling AI for the good of the planet. The report asserts that "AI can have a transformative effect on climate progress", and that Google is "Boldly accelerating climate action with AI" while "Responsibly managing the resource consumption of AI".
However, TechCrunch's Devin Coldewey writes that when it comes to AI's resource consumption, "Here Google, so sure of every statistic and estimate until now, suddenly spreads its hands and shrugs. How much energy does AI use? Can anyone really be sure?"
Headlines such as this one from the BBC highlight the fact that Google's greenhouse emissions increased by 48% between 2019 and 2023, "primarily due to increases in data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions", per the report. That isn’t a good look, no matter how much Google tries to foreground its achievements.
There are many commendable examples of Google using its influence and resources for good - but it may be difficult, even impossible, for the company to reconcile its desire to present itself as an AI leader with its desire to mitigate its impact on the environment - no matter how much potential AI may have to accelerate climate action.
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Rufus, Amazon’s chatbot, continues to live its best life
We all know AI chatbots have (sometimes) provided light relief. Amazon’s Rufus did so again this week as Twitter/X user @FrankBeard shared a screenshot of the AI assistant which, in his words, “nobody asked for” and wrote that it “doesn't even suggest topics that have anything to do with my purchase history.”
The shot includes CTAs such as ‘Get recommendations: “Best flowers to support bees”’ and ‘Keep shopping for electronics: “What electric models are suitable for beginners?”’
Maybe Amazon knows Frank better than he knows himself, or maybe this is just a result of the fact that recommendations sometimes miss (and then are optimised accordingly).
Previous confoundment/amusement about the scope of Rufus arose from the bot’s dishing out of coding advice and history lessons.
This may just be the start of what inspirational ‘personal’ shoppers look like in ecommerce.
Related Econsultancy reads on AI search experiences: A look at some LLMs in ecommerce and what they mean for UX What is AI-powered commerce search? JD Sports on AI search and digital transformationReuters Institute Digital News Report finds people less familiar with AI than you might think (and wary)
The annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report, which surveys news use among thousands of respondents across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Africa, has found that the majority of respondents surveyed still do not have much familiarity with AI.
Across 28 countries where AI questions were included, less than half of respondents (45%) said they had heard, or read, a large or moderate amount about AI. Two-fifths (40%) reported hearing or reading a small amount, and 9% said they had encountered nothing at all.
The report found that AI awareness is, perhaps unsurprisingly, higher among respondents under 35 (56% had heard a large or moderate amount about AI); more educated respondents are also likely to be more familiar (54% versus 36% with low education).
The report also indicated a widespread level of discomfort among respondents at the idea of AI involvement in news. Participants are more likely to be comfortable with the idea of AI taking a more behind-the-scenes role, but even then, only 36% feel comfortable using news made by humans with the help of AI, while just 19% say they are comfortable using news made mostly by AI with human oversight.
More familiarity with AI does translate into more comfort with the idea of AI being used in news (this figure rises to 26% among those who have seen or heard more about AI, and drops to 13% among those who have encountered it less), but it's a strong indicator of the level of wariness among the general population towards AI involvement in editorial. Many newsrooms though are looking to generative AI to stay at the cutting edge and keep up with the demand for content and insights while keeping costs low.
Some AI spam seen to rank above original reporting in Google News
A recent Wired story highlighted the ongoing problem of plagiarised blog posts in multiple languages that rank above original reporting in the Google News results.
In March and April, Google rolled out significant updates to reduce spammy content (see our piece on the Helpful Content Update) but obviously AI has upped the ante in the arms race between unethical SEOs and search engines like Google. |
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