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Paper short abstract

This paper enriches our understanding of the powerful co-enactments of AI’s epistemic and planetary effects by offering a (queer-)ecofeminist and new materialist analysis of the techniques with which “sustainable AI”-technologies are (e)valuated in order to generate ‘green’ data worldings.

Paper long abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) and sustainability unfold ambivalent intra-actions. While some promise to fix the climate crises with the help of AI, others emphasize the ecological costs of developing, maintaining and using AI. At the same time, there is growing (re-)search for so-called “sustainable AI” in industry and science. Against this background, this paper contributes to enriching our understanding of how ecological sustainability is enacted in current, techno-optimistic turns to AI.

Set at the intersection of (queer-)ecofeminism, new materialism, and (e)valuation studies, it offers a “careful analysis”(Puig de la Bellacasa 2011) of the techniques with which “sustainable AI”-technologies are (e)valuated in order to generate ‘green’ data worldings. To do so, it engages with two exemplary cases of “sustainable AI”-technologies – an App that allows to rank generative AI-tools according to their sustainability, and a ‘green’ data center – asking:

- How is sustainability (e)valuated with regards to these AI-technologies, what are the techniques and methods used to (e)valuate sustainable AI?

- What counts as sustainable, what factors in and what is left out, and who decides what is considered sustainable?

- Which values, norms, and interests are cared for in these (e)valuation procedures, and which are neglected or marginalized?

- What are the epistem-ontological and political assumptions and effects of these forms of (e)valuating “sustainable AI”?

In engaging with these questions, the paper wants to “generate care” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011) for the powerful semiotic-material entanglements of technoscience, materiality and power in more-than-human worlds.