The impact of AI

Anissa Gardizy, reporter for technology business publication The Information, covers one of the most important energy stories of the decade: how artificial intelligence (AI) is powered. She investigates cloud computing and the data centers that power the rise of AI, breaking news about some of the most powerful technology companies in the world. Before writing for The Information, Gardizy covered business and technology for The Boston Globe.

In an interview after the Apr. 8 “Climate is Every Story” event, Gardizy spoke about AI, its environmental impact, and how including a climate angle in stories makes them stronger.

What drove you to report on the growth of generative AI companies?  

I knew that I had to figure out how to specialize myself. And then I was thinking about my career as a journalist and what was going to be important down the line. And it was pretty clear that it was going to be technology companies. They kind of shape all aspects of our life. So I thought I might as well cover them. I always knew that I was going to have an interesting perspective on these companies because I've grown up with this technology and understand it pretty well.

Have you seen AI companies and data centers take measures to actually protect the environment or reduce their carbon footprints?

Data center companies are very aware that they don't have a good reputation right now, and they're all trying to do something. There are some data centers that take fewer steps to be environmentally friendly, but a lot of them do take those steps, like using closed-loop cooling systems. But when the big tech companies now talk about energy, they're talking about consumer electricity prices, not the environmental perspective. They are viewing AI as so important that it doesn't matter how much energy they're using, they just have to use it.

Has there been a change under the Trump administration?

Companies are talking less about their decarbonization goals. Under the Trump administration, everyone's talking about building more power plants with natural gas. It's shocking as a reporter just to see big tech companies talking about needing to buy gas turbines for their data centers. Three years ago, they wouldn’t be talking about this. It doesn’t make sense to me.

How do regular people react to this shift?

I don't think that many people are following it. You get people who are on really different sides of the extreme. In San Francisco, they're just talking about how we need to keep building more, and that the fastest way might be using more natural gas than installing solar panels. But if you talk to people who aren't in the AI sector, they say, “Oh, my gosh, AI is so bad for the environment.”

What steps do you plan to take to kind of cover the environmental issue around AI more?

The whole point of this series at Boston College is to ask: How do all reporters incorporate climate into their coverage? I wanted to report on business because I thought that adding numbers and basic economics into a story would make my stories better. And so I think what journalists should be doing is incorporating climate into their coverage, not because they want to or have a personal reason to, but because it can actually make your coverage better. If you write a big story on AI data centers and don't talk about anything related to climate, then maybe it's not as good of a story as it could be.

How has covering AI affected your own use of AI, both personally and in your journalistic work?

I use AI to help with my research and reporting, and that to me seems very normal. It can help refine your interview questions. I recently asked Jensen Huang a question publicly, which I don’t usually do. So I threw my question into Claude and ChatGPT, and asked them to tweak it to make it sound like something someone is going to answer, because I don't want someone to say, “no comment.”  I also use it to help connect the dots of some of my reporting. Sometimes people don't want to tell me the full story, or they tell me bits and pieces of information, and AI can be really good for pulling that all together. If I wasn't writing about AI or if I wasn't in San Francisco, maybe I would think I don't need AI to do my job. But if you're not using AI in San Francisco, it's a little bit weird.

Full disclosure, I'm a generative AI skeptic. As someone who covers AI all the time, how would you convince me that it's a good tool to use in journalism?  

My pitch to you would be, use AI so that most of your time can be spent doing original reporting and talking to people. AI will never touch original reporting, your ability to talk to sources, get them comfortable with you, but there are probably lots of things you do in the reporting process that AI is way better at.