For years, we have had unconfirmed reports and rumours that AI-controlled weapons have killed soldiers on the battlefield without a human in the loop. Now, we know it has happened.

As we report here, the use of autonomous killers in a test exercise marks a watershed in warfare. But we shouldn’t be surprised. The technology has existed for some time and humans have never invented a weapon and then refrained from using it.

That doesn’t mean we can’t reverse course. The logic for a ban on autonomous weapons is simple: deploying AI without human oversight risks weapons accidentally targeting troops on the wrong side or even civilians. What’s more, ethicists say that such weapons deprive combatants of their dignity, make war too easy to wage and muddy the waters when it comes to responsibility for lethal action.

But if we are to ban these weapons, just as we have done with cluster bombs and lasers designed to blind soldiers, we should have acted before they arrived, not after. The United Nations has been in talks to ban fully autonomous weapons for over a decade, but according to the Human Rights Watch campaign group, India, Israel, Russia and the US have vetoed the discussions.

Humans have never invented a weapon and then refrained from using it

The framework to ban autonomous weapons already exists – they could easily be added to the list of excessively injurious or indiscriminate arms proscribed by the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. More difficult to reckon with is the fact that these drones can be made with inexpensive parts ordered online and some open-source software. Any
tech-literate teenager could do it.

As we explore here, the war in Ukraine has made it clear that robots will dominate future battlefields. The question the world must now answer is whether a human should always be involved, ultimately responsible for the decision to pull the trigger, or whether machines can be allowed to act alone. Whichever we choose, a decision must be made before the technology proliferates.

UN researchers are urging people to be less polite to artificial intelligences after a report found that cutting words from prompts could reduce ChatGPT’s energy consumption by up to 25 per cent.

Removing “please”, “thank you” and other unnecessary words from AI prompts could save 87 to 98 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, the report from the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) found. That is the equivalent of the annual residential electricity use of up to 760,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa.

To reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint, people should write concise prompts, avoid getting sucked into conversation loops and refrain from starting relationships with AI, the researchers said.

“We are not saying be rude to your AI. But don’t fall into the interaction trap and don’t go falling in love with it either,” says at UNU-INWEH.

The large language models behind AI chatbots process text in small units known as tokens. Madani says concise prompts can save energy because they can reduce both the number of tokens the model has to process and the number it generates in response. In some cases, shorter prompts may also simplify the task, further reducing the power required.

The UN study – one of the most comprehensive assessments of the environmental costs of AI to date – warns of rapidly increasing energy, land and water use due to the growing adoption of the technology.

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ChatGPT alone now processes around 2.5 billion queries every day and Google 16 billion, the majority of which have integrated AI summaries.

Tech companies disclose little information on their energy use, so the researchers used the available data for their data centres.

AI currently accounts for about 20 per cent of the energy used by data centres, but that share is projected to double to around 40 per cent in the next few years. By 2030, AI alone could consume around 378 terawatt-hours a year and data centres could use 945 TWh in total — almost 3 per cent of projected global electricity use.

The 9.3 trillion litres of water projected to be needed by data centres by 2030 is enough to meet the minimum annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa.

“You’re looking at something on a global scale that is being adopted faster than any other technology in the history of technology, so the energy use is increasing very rapidly,” says at UNU-INWEH.

The researchers said AI companies should be required to publish their energy consumption, while governments should introduce energy caps on companies and individuals, but it is also crucial to educate the public on how to use AI efficiently.

People should be encouraged to avoid using AI unnecessarily and, when they do use it, to cut words and use less powerful models, says Madani.

They should also be aware that generating an image uses 60 times more energy than a text query, enough to power a 10-watt LED bulb for about 17 minutes.

A complex video uses up to 8000 times more than text and could power the same bulb for about 1.7 days.

“We are not saying AI is bad,” says Madani. “We are just saying let’s use it in a proper way. It’s like a knife: you can save a patient’s life in the operating theatre, but you can also kill someone with it.”