arXiv AI By Farnaz Farid, Tashfia Towkee, Sania Nasreen, Sami bin Azad

Beyond the Last Truffula Tree: SustainAI - A Water-Aware, Closed-Loop Framework for Environmentally Accountable AI

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SustainAI is a water‑aware, closed‑loop framework that embeds environmental accountability into AI deployment. It combines real‑time water metering, a hallucination‑aware penalty model, and a water‑aware routing algorithm that considers regional water stress. In tests with small language models, water footprints varied 11‑fold across data centers, and 1,335 inference runs consumed about 399 mL of water but yielded only 240 correct outputs, highlighting the resource cost of inaccurate responses.

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