The environmental costs of AI: Exploring the environmental impacts of AI in language services and the steps we can take as a profession to address them

The increasing use of AI technologies such as neural machine translation (NMT) and large language models (LLMs) in language services is already a hot topic, with translators and interpreters raising questions about ethics, transparency and quality etc. Many ITI members are also concerned about the significant environmental costs arising from the training and use of AI. We therefore felt that it is important to inform members about this aspect of the AI debate and asked Dr Matthew Riemland to share his expertise.