Towards Socially and Environmentally Responsible AI

TL;DR

This paper addresses the social and environmental inequities caused by AI's energy consumption and resource distribution, proposing a geographically fair load balancing method that reduces regional disparities.

Contribution

It introduces equitable geographical load balancing with novel regularization to fairly distribute AI's social and environmental costs across regions.

Findings

Existing load balancing algorithms cause regional disparities in social and environmental costs.

Proposed equitable GLB effectively reduces regional inequities in AI resource impacts.

Empirical results demonstrate fairer distribution of costs across regions with the new method.

Abstract

The sharply increasing sizes of artificial intelligence (AI) models come with significant energy consumption and environmental footprints, which can disproportionately impact certain (often marginalized) regions and hence create environmental inequity concerns. Moreover, concerns with social inequity have also emerged, as AI computing resources may not be equitably distributed across the globe and users from certain disadvantaged regions with severe resource constraints can consistently experience inferior model performance. Importantly, the inequity concerns that encompass both social and environmental dimensions still remain unexplored and have increasingly hindered responsible AI. In this paper, we leverage the spatial flexibility of AI inference workloads and propose equitable geographical load balancing (GLB) to fairly balance AI's regional social and environmental costs. Concretely, to penalize the disproportionately high social and environmental costs for equity, we introduce $L_q$ norms as novel regularization terms into the optimization objective for GLB decisions. Our empirical results based on real-world AI inference traces demonstrate that while the existing GLB algorithms result in disproportionately large social and environmental costs in certain regions, our proposed equitable GLB can fairly balance AI's negative social and environmental costs across all the regions.