“Something’s fishy,” declared a March newsletter from the right-wing, fossil fuel-funded think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation. The caption looms under an imposing image of a stranded whale on a beach, with three huge offshore wind turbines in the background.

Something truly was fishy about that image. It’s not because offshore wind causes whale deaths, a groundless conspiracy pushed by fossil fuel interests that the image attempts to bolster. It’s because, as Gizmodo writer Molly Taft reported, the photo was fabricated using artificial intelligence. Along with eerily pixelated sand, oddly curved beach debris, and mistakenly fused together wind turbine blades, the picture also retains a tell-tale rainbow watermark from the artificially intelligent image generator DALL-E.

DALL-E is one of countless AI models that have risen to otherworldly levels of popularity, particularly in the last year. But as hundreds of millions of users marvel at AI’s ability to produce novel images and believable text, the current wave of hype has concealed how AI could be hindering our ability to make progress on climate change.

Advocates argue that these impacts — which include vast carbon emissions associated with the electricity needed to run the models, a pervasive use of AI in the oil and gas industry to boost fossil fuel extraction, and a worrying uptick in the output of misinformation — are flying under the radar. While many prominent researchers and investors have stoked fears around AI’s “godlike” technological force or potential to end civilization, a slew of real-world consequences aren’t getting the attention they deserve.

Many of these harms extend far beyond climate issues, including algorithmic racism, copyright infringement, and exploitative working conditions for data workers who help develop AI models. “We see technology as an inevitability and don’t think about shaping it with societal impacts in mind,” David Rolnick, a computer science professor at McGill University and a co-founder of the nonprofit Climate Change AI, told Grist.

Read the full article about AI consequences by Akielly Hu at Grist.