Al Jazeera Podcasts.

Today, the cost of our AI obsession.

Though there's talk that AI might hold the answers to the climate crisis, it's also part of the problem, one that's only going

to get bigger as the technology advances and its use grows.

How every answer from a friendly artificial intelligence assistant is straining the environment.

I'm Malika Bilal, and this is The Take.

How much do you play around with AI?

Maybe you use it to write essays,

or have celebrities do music covers of songs they've never sung.

For one reporter who's steeped in the tech industry, the answer is as little as possible.

If you're talking about AI the way it's been used in the past couple years,

which is generative AI tools like writing tools, tools to create images,

I don't really use those beyond just sort of

playing around to see what they'll spit out.

I'm Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist, and I'm based in New York City.

Sophie covers AI and the harms it can cause, but she says she's unable to fully opt out of using it.

Because like most people, I do spend too much time doom scrolling on social media.

So AI is such a broad term that a lot of things fall under that umbrella. So when I am

scrolling through a social media feed, there is an algorithm behind the scenes

determining which posts will pop up. It's trying to choose the posts that will make me

engage the most, that will snag my attention. And that algorithm uses machine learning. So that

is technically, in a lot of ways, an AI algorithm. All of that takes a lot of data.

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