Is “green AI” even possible?

Ecosia, the search engine that directs its profits to climate action, asks whether there’s a “green” alternative for generative AI in the title of this post — and in the same post’s headline answers that “the world’s greenest AI is here.”

The “greenest AI,” that paradox, is the one Ecosia just launched integrated into its search. The implementation mirrors Google’s: a summary (“AI Overviews”) above results and a one‑click away chatbot. The obvious difference is a button to disable AI. The less obvious — and crucial — claim is that:

As a not-for-profit company, we can afford to do things differently. AI Search uses smaller, more efficient models, and we avoid energy-heavy features like video generation altogether.

Details are missing (which “smaller, more efficient models”?) and the example is odd (no search engine with AI currently offers video generation).

I’m not against generative AI — that would be hypocritical, since I use it occasionally. (And on another search engine, DuckDuckGo’s.)

That’s why headlines like this and Mozilla pouring everything into AI for Firefox leave me uneasy. No matter the appeal, it seems odd for a service whose raison d’être is climate action to jump on a wave so energy‑hungry it’s reviving nuclear plants and prompting big techs to drop carbon‑reduction promises.

The “greener AI,” ultimately, is not having AI at all. Ignoring it — at least until adoption stabilizes and environmental impacts are better understood — would be coherent and even a differentiator in a sea of companies adding AI for the sake of it.