Volvo’s AI-generated advertisement was drawn in Saudi Arabia because it was ‘not in line with the worldwide guidelines of Volvo Cars’

Volvo has created an advertisement generated by AI for Saudi Arabia because it is “not in line with the global guidelines of Volvo Cars.” The advertisement, entitled “Come Back Stronger”, initially received a glowing writing in AdweekBut it was also difficult to understand how it was once approved. Apart from the part where the car advertisement did not contain cars, artificial intelligence is incredibly energy -intensive and notoriously terrible for the planet. Volvo, on the other hand, says that it is committed to beating emissions and saving the planet, so you would think that AI would have been an “no” even before someone suggested using it.

Nevertheless, Volvo could have compensated the emissions created by the advertisement that was “according to Adweek”[p]Stretched by Dubai-Founded Lion Creative for Volvo’s Europe, Middle East and Africa Division and Electromin, the Saudi distributor of the Automaker. “So I did what a respectable journalist would do and asked a Volvo Rep. They are unable to answer my questions, we are close to the AD official explanation:” We are near the AD in Saud. Arabia. It was a local initiative, not in line with the worldwide guidelines of Volvo Cars. The advertisement is being brought down/withdrawn. “

Although the video was still mentioned on the YouTube channel of Volvo KSA earlier this morning, it has been removed since then. However, the internet never forgets our friends in a convenient way Auto I still have a copy that you can view. Just don’t expect anything too exciting. According to Adweek, our Western eyes will not get it because it is specifically made for a Saudi Arabic audience:

For a Western eye, it can be a challenge to see how this interplay of rhetoric and images can speak an American car buyer – but of course that is not the target group here. Told in Arabic (although there is an English version), the advertisement is a mélange of “technically accurate and culturally resonating views for Saudi Arabia”, Lion’s founder and director of Lion Creative Director Osama Saddiq told Adweek.

And although I would like to tell you that I personally killed a bad car advertisement in the same way as I personally gave the PR representative personally a headache on Thursday evening, the advertisement in itself generated a lot of controversy. In fact, the pushback was strong enough Adweek published a follow-up chief of an AD-Exec who defended the use of AI. In particular, however, editorial does not include the words, “environment”, “sustainability”, “emissions” or “carbon”. You would think that this would be the most important care here, but perhaps it is simply more convenient to leave that part away. It is less fun to talk about AI when someone is on it to bring how terrible it is for the planet we live on.

At the moment, nobody really believes that the man -made climate change is not real. There will be people in the commentary that claim they do that, but they know. However, admitting publicly would mean that the other team was always correct, and they have been felt in Facebook to ever. It is better to bury their heads in the sand or to buy a place in an underground city as they had in Paradise. In a world where we had listened to the scientists and had received our energy from sustainable sources, AI’s insatiable thirst for electricity would be less a problem. In reality, however, you simply cannot use an ethical AI if you in the least care about the planet.

Yet it can be difficult to understand how much energy AI uses. As an overview of the Polytechnic Institute or Paris indicates, getting an answer from Chatgpt 10 times uses the energy compared to a regular Google search. Yet that does not completely illustrate the scale we are talking about, especially because fancy autocomplete is quite efficient compared to generating image. Making a single AI image requires about 40 times more energy than generating text, making an AI video different orders worse than asking grock to steal a recipe for you. It is also difficult to estimate exactly how much energy is used specifically for AI, but in the coming years, AI will probably use electricity per year between 85 billion and 134 billion kilowatt hours. And you know what they say – a billion kWh here, a billion kWh there, and soon you’re talking about real emissions.

If that still does not put it in perspective for you, the same review mentions an estimate of the international energy agency that suggests between 2022 and 2026 the increase in the energy requirements of data centers, cryptocurrencies and AI on the same rate with the entire country of Sweden on the low end and Germany on the high side. The assessment was also published in November last year, so newer models probably use even more energy than the estimates used to reach those conclusions. And although some companies work to compensate some of those emissions, Google’s newest environmental report showed that even those efforts have not been enough, saying: “Our [2023] emission […] have risen by 37% compared to 2022, despite considerable efforts and progress in renewable energy. This is due to the electricity consumption of our data centers, which exceeds our capacity to develop renewable energy projects. “

Ultimately, it is almost impossible to use AI and also to limit the damage of global climate change because we have to reduce our emissions, so that they are not increased. While Anne-Laure Ligozat, a professor of computer science and Lisn, said: “None of Google’s arguments to reduce AI emissions.” And although models can become more efficient, that will also encourage people to use them more often. “This tends to cancel potential energy saving,” wrote Ligozat’s co-author Alex de Vries. “My most important argument is that AI must be used sparingly.”

So while no one who works for a company that claims to believe in science and wants to touch Net-Zero by 2040, an AI advertisement should have approved, the people at the top were at least prepared to withdraw the advertisement. And hopefully, car manufacturers who say they believe in science to use AI advertisements in the future.