'Hidden' environmental impact of deepfake videos

Platforms, such as Open AI's Sora, have gone viral due to their ability to make hyper-realistic videos

You can barely scroll through social media at the moment without seeing deepfake videos generated by artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

Platforms, such as Open AI's Sora, have gone viral due to their ability to make hyper-realistic videos, leading to people sharing faked scenes of deceased celebrities and historical figures in bizarre and often offensive scenarios.

The videos have even forced the families of deceased figures, including that of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, to appeal to AI firms to ban their loved-ones from featuring.

But behind the emotional impact of the deepfakes, a lecturer at the University of Oxford is now warning about their environmental footprint.

Dr Kevin Grecksch explained that there was "quite a huge hidden impact on the environment" because "somewhere these videos have to be produced - and that's typically not on your phone".

"It happens in a data centre which could be somewhere across the world, or maybe just around the corner, you never know," he said.

"First of all that uses up a lot of electricity and secondly it uses a lot of water."

Data centres use large amounts of fresh water to cool servers on an industrial level scale.

The new apps make it easy for users to post videos they have created to social media, and has resulted in a deluge of videos on social feeds.

Earlier this month, Sora was downloaded more than a million times in less than five days - with the app still topping the Apple App Store charts in the US.

But Dr Grecksch warned that people should be "mindful" of the platforms environmental impact.

"There's a lot of water involved and I think we just need to think about what we're using it for, how we're using it, and how often we're using it," he said.

He said the "cat was out of the sack" with regards to AI, but urged people to have "a little bit more integrated thinking around where we put data centres and how we are cooling them".

"The government sees south Oxfordshire as one of the first AI growth areas, but that's a massive problem because apparently no one has thought where the water is going to come from that's going to cool down those servers."

"There's a lot of questions we need to think about."