One of the largest breakthroughs of the 21st century has been in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly the creation of ChatGPT. Widely known for its intuitive language processing and free, public access to an unlimited amount of information, ChatGPT has become ingrained into daily life, and as it continues to evolve and expand its influence, we must be aware of not just what it offers us but what it also demands from others. Injustices caused indirectly by ChatGPT have long harmed local indigenous and rural communities, meaning that AI’s explosive growth threatens to worsen already precarious conditions. To recognize the impacts of ChatGPT on these communities, there are two essential components to understand first: the resource-intensive nature of both ChatGPT and lithium mining.
Revolutionary in its making, Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT undergo a series of machine learning training stages to allow consumers access to a seemingly unlimited supply of information. During its unsupervised training phase, where the machine is given access to a large corpus of text, LLMs learn general features and patterns of natural language. This method is known as a transformer-based neural network and includes processing web sources, books, online datasets, and human-generated data. Training these models demands huge amounts of energy, as data centers rely heavily on water and cooling systems, causing significant environmental damage. The Washington Post found that for every 100-word email generated by an AI chatbot, about 1 bottle of water is wasted. Think of the water bill for that!
Now that we understand ChatGPT and its cost of running, let’s look at the cost of creation: lithium extraction. Lithium is one of many “critical minerals”, metals essential for battery technologies like electric vehicles (EVs), renewable energies (REs), and data centers. The global supply chain of lithium is vast, interconnected, and vulnerable. Factors like geographic concentration of extraction and the associated “arms race” to control these areas mean that local communities are often overlooked and exploited. This trend was exacerbated by Donald Trump in 2017, when he signed an executive order expanding the concept of critical mineral security to include the entire supply chain, in an effort to assert US influence and dominance in controlling global resources. This had stark consequences, as the influx of countries competing to control these resources further deteriorated any regard for localized impact.
In one such location, the Lithium Triangle, injustices for indigenous communities are extremely evident, particularly around the mining sites. Nestled between the borders of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, this area of the Andes hosts more than 75% of the world’s lithium reserves and is essential to the creation and maintenance of AI. However, many of these deposits are located on the ancestral lands of indigenous communities, who have consistently faced threatened ecosystems from lithium mining. Raw lithium is primarily extracted by drilling into subsurface fluids, known as brines, and pumping the liquid into pools to evaporate the water, leaving behind the lithium. This process is highly energy-intensive and causes immense socio-environmental costs, such as water depletion, ecosystem destruction, indigenous displacement, and economic inequity. These costly tendencies are labeled green extractivism, a term reminiscent of past extractivist colonial institutions, as corporations override sustainability concerns through lobbying. Often, local governments ease indigenous land rights and restrict the ability to protest in favor of profits. Historically, the indigenous communities hosting the mining industries have been disproportionately impacted, known as green sacrificial zones (GSZ), areas prone to chemical pollution from industries. Lithium mining produces these GSZs, where private enterprises shift the economic and environmental costs of production to neighboring communities, known as frontline communities, who suffer directly. For example, in the Puna Plateau in Argentina, the indigenous frontline community relies on underground water adjacent to the salt flats, which is continuously depleted by mining efforts in that region. Extractivist tendencies, as observed from the European conquest of Africa in the 1800s, have preyed on and burdened these communities with impossible impacts, without installing proper infrastructure to involve community leaders in mining processes.
The ever-increasing rise of language models has accelerated the demand for lithium batteries to power data centers. This means that global demand for lithium has increased, scaling up mining efforts despite the vulnerable communities immediately affected. The just transition is built on fossil fuels, as all energy transitions before it built upon their energy predecessors. So even while lithium is used in EVs and other RE strategies, its cost is rooted in inequality. Therefore, as OpenAI products are being scaled up to meet the high demand for advancements in the field, and more data centers are built to supply the demand, more lithium-ion batteries are created within the already vulnerable global market, further damaging the frontline communities of the mining industry.
Lithium mining has serious environmental and economic issues already prevalent in many green sacrificial zones abutting mining areas. Ratifying human rights principles like Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) helps enshrine accountability from tech companies as they involve local indigenous communities in mining processes and share in economic benefits. Stricter environmental and labor regulations in lithium mining are integral to indigenous community rights protection as well as investment in alternative battery chemistries and locally-led RE initiatives or mining cooperatives. We must ask ourselves: Are we willing to pay the cost of our queries, or let others bear the burden in their quarries?
