Hwb Downplaying the Environmental Impact of Generative AI?

This morning I've been looking through a document from the Hwb website. Titled, "Generative artificial intelligence in education" and subtitled, "Opportunities and considerations for schools and settings relating to the use of Gen AI." It attempts to outline for schools what generative AI is, opportunities for schools in using gen AI, how to engage responsibly and considerations around gen AI. A couple of things caught my attention but for this post I'm going to focus on a section called 'Environmental Impacts' (see image above), as in my opinion, it is trying really, really hard to play down the substantial effects of generative AI on the environment.

"The integration of AI in education offers significant opportunities to contribute to environmental goals by reducing reliance on paper and streamlining operations." - A very surprising opening sentence. I really think the author here is 'clutching at straws' somewhat in using this as an argument. In fact, in everything that I have read around AI, I have never heard anyone arguing that limiting the amount of paper that a school produces will help to offset the huge amount of natural resources that are used and fossil fuels that are burned in creating gen AI. While I can't disagree with trying to limit the amount of paper documents, trying to compare limiting the amount of paper being used by a school, with the ever increasing amount of energy hungry, hyper-scale data centres around the world, seems like quite a ridiculous argument to make. 

"To address this, it is essential to adopt energy-efficient AI systems and ensure their use is both strategic and sustainable." - How can schools across Wales adopt an "energy-efficient AI system', especially when the generative AI systems that are already provided to schools through the Hwb platform are Microsoft Co-Pilot and Google Gemini? Companies who are not renown for creating energy-efficient hyper-scale data centres, to say the very least. The very process these two companies, and others, rely on to build their AI models is extremely power hungry. I would be very surprised if Hwb are encouraging schools to go outside of its platform (see my post on Hwb and School Autonomy) to find 'energy-efficient' AI systems, even if such systems exist.