2mo ago

Should tech companies be required to report AI’s environmental impact, or is voluntary transparency enough?

Pros And Cons Of S.B. 3732: The Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act | ACE

Can voluntary reporting by tech companies actually lead to meaningful environmental change, or does it require mandatory regulation to be effective? Additionally, could this type of legislation set a precedent for holding the broader tech industry accountable for its ecological footprint?

https://ace-usa.org/blog/research/research-technology/pros-and-cons-of-s-b-3732-the-artificial-intelligence-environmental-impacts-act/

8 comments

Corporations must be forced to do the right thing, they literally exist to exploit and destroy and privatize profits thru socializing losses and externalities

If you think 'voluntary' is acceptable for anything important you want corporations to do, you have no business making decisions about real life. If it's voluntary, they'll only do it if it benefits them.
- If it’s voluntary, they’ll only do it if it benefits them.
  Often not even then. They'll only do it if it is trivial to determine that it undeniably benefits the decision-makers personally.

Lol. "Voluntary Transparency" isn't that against current USA standards cuse it has "Trans" in it?
- Gotta replace it with "low opaqueness".

You are either naive or new to this planet. If you tell industry that this or that thing is voluntary, it will definitely not happen. There must be thousands of examples out there. "Voluntary" regulation never worked on this planet.
If you want industry to do something, there is the stupid way of bribing them into it, and the smart way of simply forcing them to comply. If you do the latter, they will still squirm, complain, and demand money (loads of money!) to follow the law. If you forgot to define fines for non-compliance or made them too small, they won't follow the law, either, of course, so the fines have to be painful enough so they can't just file them away as "costs of doing business".

It's a loaded question, if the transparency reports are enough they'll likely cover whatever the law requires.
The real question is basically should companies report environmental impact for AI training; I'm on the fence for this. It sounds good on paper, but will it cause investment overseas and is it the most useful place to burden companies?

If you mandate reporting the accountants will design a reporting scheme that makes the default company behaviour appear environmentally friendly
Something something goodhart's law

8 comments