Behind the output of Large Language Models like Chat GPT lies a journey with complex environmental and social impacts, from the extraction of minerals by children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to training systems that expose people to violent and degrading imagery in countries like Nigeria, and to vast, resource-guzzling data centers in regions where energy, water and access to transmission infrastructure is cheap. This means that the AI boom has the potential to create new resource production and consumption economies — likely in communities which are already marginalized or have been subject to previous resource booms and busts.
Yet, these costs are rarely recognized and they raise profound questions about sustainability, not just from a mineral resource point of view, but also in the broader, moral sense — do we want to build a society that profits off the suffering of the world's most marginalized? Will this end up fracturing societies and lead to the politics of resentment?
