Ash Pickett is a Business Administration Junior and opinion columnist for Mustang News. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
On Monday April 28th, Cal Poly sent out a campus-wide email introducing ChatGPT Edu, which may be a step in the right direction for educational purposes, but it’s a net irresponsible one with little thought given to the messaging and implications behind the decision in terms of environmental impact.
If you’re not living under a rock, you probably know that using large language and generative AI models has the potential to be damaging for the environment. Large data centers used for AI are notorious for using significant amounts of water to cool their electricity systems, and also may generate high levels of carbon emissions.
I don’t think rolling out system-wide accessibility for ChatGPT Edu means the Cal State system is necessarily contributing a ton to environmental damage directly (or at least as direct as you can get as a consumer of ChatGPT). After all, plenty of students already use either the normal version of ChatGPT or ChatGPT4-o anyway.
My issue is with the messaging. In their school-wide emails, nowhere has Cal Poly warned students against the overuse of AI or mentioned the implications that AI usage has on the environment. They’re endorsing a product on a large scale without providing a disclaimer of its potential drawbacks. Cal State and Cal Poly’s negligence to clarify or consider the ethical implications of this decision is harmful and imprudent.
It’s also common knowledge at this point that the CSU and Cal Poly didn’t consult their own in-house experts on the implementation of ChatGPT Edu. How about the experts on Environmental Management and Protection, of which Cal Poly offers its very own Bachelor of Science Degree? I bet they would’ve had something to say.
To me, this whole situation feels like someone at the top of the Cal State system got convinced by an OpenAI salesperson that this would put us at the front of education. They were told that we need to get on it ASAP to make the Cal State system more attractive to the quickly changing economic environment. I speculate that a quick decision was made with good intentions, but little consideration.
I want to clarify that I think AI is great in a lot of ways. I’m also a business student, so I’m the last person to be an AI-dissenter. I applaud the CSU in a way for trying to be on top of technology, where public education is usually very slow to change.
I like the general idea behind it: empower our students to learn with AI rather than restrict AI. I’m a cautious optimist when it comes to AI, and I’d much rather work with the flow of traffic than against it.
That said, we still need to be conscious of the way we use AI in our individual lives, and collectively, we need to work on solutions to keep up with the energy and resource consumption that AI relies on. That means the systems and groups that support AI usage need to be especially conscientious of what messages they’re sending.
You’re not killing a turtle when you use ChatGPT. But if the Cal State is going to introduce such an energy-intensive product to hundreds of thousands of people, they should be making students aware of the environmental toll.
