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The cost of AI is being paid in deserts far from Silicon Valley
In Empire of AI, journalist Karen Hao writes about the rise of OpenAI and the impacts of AI around the world. Below is an extract from the book on the effects on Chile's mineral reserves and water resources.
The material is primarily extracted out of the Salar de Atacama, the largest salt flat in the country, by pumping its brine out into shimmering pools of turquoise and waiting for the sun to evaporate and crystallize the solution into lithium and other by-products. In 2022, as the European Union set new policies around the energy transition and the demand for lithium skyrocketed, both companies and politicians in Chile and the rest of the world lauded the importance of the country’s mining industry in propelling forward a better future. In Brazil, a 2023 art exhibition coproduced by a Chilean university showed the vast chasm between the reality of Latin America’s rich Indigenous cultures and the woefully bereft depictions of them spit out by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion as primitive, technologically inept peoples.
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