Meme-tivism: Rethinking AI’s Environmental Impact 

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As Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure has grown in scale and complexity, the planetary resources and energy that are required to feed its computational operations have seen a significant increase, posing a substantial threat to environmental sustainability. While this impact is gaining attention, widespread adoption of sustainable practices and sustainable decision-making mechanisms in AI work remains limited. To meaningfully communicate the responsibility of AI practitioners in addressing the environmental footprint of their work, there is a need to foster situated awareness grounded in practitioners’ own contexts and that goes beyond generic, abstract and guilt-inducing narratives.

This project explores how creative, participatory strategies can make sustainability concerns more approachable and relatable, utilizing humor and memes as a medium to critically reflect not only on the impacts but also on the challenges and lived experiences of addressing them. Drawing on the established culture of online humor within developer communities, and inspired by use of memes for climate advocacy, we investigate memes as a medium for shared reflection and critical dialogue. This workshop is a hands-on guided meme creation session to collaboratively utilize humor to shed light on lived experiences, perceptions, challenges and concerns of AI practitioners regarding environmental footprint of their work.

Get in touch via: sinem.gorucu@kcl.ac.uk