(or: Why don’t we practice Carbon Reporting in Computational Humanities?) Oh, the debated question of whether personal or academic LLM use is environmentally problematic. Every once in a while, there’s a wave of discussion about the environmental impacts of using AI (especially large language models) in research, particularly in the digital humanities. Then it dies down again, and we all go about our lives as before. But I’ve been wondering: beyond having this on our “we should really look into this” list—are people actually doing anything about it? Are we practicing carbon reporting in digital humanities? Nope, not really. But I think we should be. We need to start taking action now. We need to make carbon reporting a requirement for research, just like we expect people to make their code reproducible (which, according to a recent study, isn’t working as well as one would hope, either). Awareness is not enough It’s not enough to be aware of the issue.
read more Guesstimating Environmental Impacts of LLM Workflows
LaTeX Ninja'ing and the Digital Humanities 