Presenters say AI is useful, but also environmentally harmful

Presenters offered widely different perspectives about artificial intelligence, or AI, at two recent regional presentations.
IT auditor Ben Burkett of Dolores said it’s a useful tool during a presentation by the League of Women Voters on July 11.
But in a July 7 webinar, several Native commentators decried its impacts on tribal nations and the environment.
Burkett, speaking before an audience of several dozen at the Cortez Public Library, said he audits how organizations govern AI. He said he uses it “pretty prolifically” in his profession.
“The way I use AI is as a tool,” he said. “There’s a fear that it’s going to take my thinking away. . . but it enhances my thought processes.”
As an IT auditor, he is given “tons of information” that he would have to review manually, he said. But the AI tool he uses, Claude, reviews the evidence and writes it up for him.
“All I have to do is review it,” he said. “My expertise still matters.”
He said he is excited about AI, but also anxious about it, because there are legitimate concerns regarding how it can be used.
AI makes it much easier to reproduce people’s voice and appearance, so fake videos and phone calls that seem quite genuine can be used to defraud the vulnerable. Digital price tags, which are appearing in supermarkets, can theoretically change the price of an item depending on who is looking at it.
AI is already being used to make photographs of rooms in houses for sale appear better than they actually are, he said.
But AI could be a great benefit in medical research, agriculture, prediction of wildfires, and other areas, he said. And concerns about it leading to sentient computer intelligences with malevolent intent are overblown, Burkett said.
He mentioned the frightening HAL computer in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said. “It’s a powerful tool now, as good or bad as how you use it.”
Burkett said it’s absolutely necessary for him to use AI in his business. “If I don’t move forward, I’m going to be left behind my competitors,” he said.
Likewise, on a national level, the United States is surging forward in developing AI in an effort to stay ahead of China, he said.
Burkett said he isn’t urging people to use AI. “You just shouldn’t be afraid of it,” he said.
But in a July 7 webinar on “AI, Data Centers, and the Impact on Tribal Nations,”a number of Native speakers voiced concerns about the proliferation of AI data centers.
Jennifer Fairbanks of the Native Organizers Alliance, a national nonprofit that arranged the webinar, said more than a hundred data centers are proposed on or next to Native lands.
Zam DeShields, an AI and technology consultant specializing in indigenous interests, said AI is “autocomplete scaled up.” DeShields, who goes by “they,” said AI data sets were trained largely by using English, with almost no basis in Native languages.
“What we’re looking at is a model that’s not neutral,” DeShields said. “For indigenous communities and indigenous people, the representation isn’t there and won’t ever be.”
AI is being created to serve large companies, they said. “It’s not individual users that need AI, it’s corporations and everything else.”
A typical Native tribe does not need the quantity of computer power produced by a data center, but “something more along the line of a server room,” DeShields said.
Tech companies are seeking land on which to construct data centers, promising they will bring jobs and economic benefits to the areas where they are. Such centers typically take up 600 to more than 2,000 acres.
DeShields said one center in Rapid City, S.D., was supposed to create 1,500 jobs, but just three permanent positions remained after the center’s construction.
They said there are alternatives to using major corporate AI – such as indigenous-built AI products, which are quite different.
Biologist Elijah Small of the Brave Heart Society, which works to enhance and preserve the Dakota/Nakota/Lakota culture, spoke about the environmental impacts of data centers, particularly on the Missouri River near his home.
“If you were asking me to design a system to destroy a river, I couldn’t think of a better tool than an AI data center,” Small said.
Natural rivers have been “chunked up” by dams in the name of progress, he said, and now are even more threatened by data centers.
“AI centers require massive water withdrawals,” he said. “Even if they’re returning water to the system, water is lost from the system through evaporation. . . . When you pull water out of a river, there’s less river there.”
In addition, Small said, if a center is using a pass-through system, it will heat the water it uses, then return that heated water to the system. The Missouri River is a coldwater system, with fish adapted to that temperature.
“Warm water can move down the river system, and if you have a series of data centers in a row, it will have a huge effect.”
The Missouri has already lost 51 of the 67 native species of fish that it once had, he said. Twenty centers between the Missouri’s headwaters and the Fort Randall Dam would transform it from coldwater to warmwater.
Forty-four species of birds, 15 of reptiles, and 15 amphibian species would be affected by the changes along the whole Missouri corridor, as well as plants such as cottonwoods, many medicinal plants, fungi, mussels, and the aquatic invertebrates that form the food web of the Missouri.
“Data centers could be the final nail in the coffin that takes the Missouri River to a completely different system,” Small said.
Alexis Archambault, a hydrologist with the Brave Heart Society, said AI is expanding faster than regulation can handle it.
Data centers are designed to handle intense AI workloads, she said. The centers support servers, digital storage equipment, and network infrastructure necessary for large-scale data processing and storage.
About half the energy in a data center is used for cooling, she said. Data centers generate enormous amounts of heat, and most use massive quantities of freshwater to do the cooling.
Large centers consume about 5 million gallons of water a day, while medium centers use 110 million gallons a year, Archambault said.
Although some centers are touted as “closed-loop systems,” meaning they circulate the water used for cooling through sealed pipes and reuse it, that is somewhat misleading, she said. Closed-loop systems are more water-efficient than systems using evaporative cooling, but such systems are not water-neutral. They rely on a “second loop” to cool the water that has been heated, and that uses evaporation or other methods involving water.
“Closed-loop systems do in fact require water,” she said.
And manufacturing microchips requires ultrapure treated water, Archambault said; it takes about 1.5 gallons of tap water to produce one gallon of ultrapure water. A typical chip factory uses about 10 million gallons of ultrapure water each day, the equivalent of the water use of 33,000 households in the United States, according to numerous reports.
A simple 100-word AI prompt requires the use of about one bottle of water, she said. Google’s data centers in the U.S. alone consumed an estimated 12.7 billion liters of fresh water in 2021 to keep their servers cool.
All this is occurring as the western United States, where many centers are being built, experiences extended drought.
“Water on planet Earth today is all the water that will ever be,” she said. Just 2 percent of the world’s water is fresh, and half of that is locked up in ice caps and glaciers, which if they melt go into the oceans.
“Data center developments are increasingly tapping into freshwater sources and aquifers,” Archambault said.
In addition, the largest data centers consume more than 2 terawatt hours (2 trillion watt hours) of electricity per year. That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 200,000 homes, she said.
In 2023, data centers were responsible for 4.4 percent of the total electricity consumption in the United States, she said.
The water demand, power demand, ecosystem impacts, health impacts, carbon emissions, effects of mining and manufacturing, and electronic waste associated with data centers require that they undergo greater scrutiny, she said.
“We think it’s one of the greatest threats we have ever faced,” said Faith Spotted Eagle, an activist with the Brave Heart Society.