Sonja Solomun Chairs “Green AI” Panel at 73rd ICA Conference
We are delighted to share that Sonja Solomun, Deputy Director, chaired and presented her work at the 2023 “Green AI” panel at the 73rd International Communications Association (ICA) conference.
The “Green AI” panel brought together an esteemed cohort of interdisciplinary international academic experts intent on interrogating the power dynamics shaping “Green AI”-- a purported climate solution proffered by industry’s largest emitters. The panel examined crucial equity and justice considerations, which are routinely omitted from industry’s focus on so-called green AI.
Panelists focused on topics ranging from environmental justice, resource allocation, and the impacts of AI on lived communities and environments. The subjects of the papers critically examined and chronicled real-world contemporary case studies pertaining to a range of issues including, the validity of Big Tech’s environmental pledges and their extractive labour practices, as well as the fraught technocratic notion that algorithmic principles can be applied to natural resource management in a manner that is safe for both the environment and the community.
The panel extends Solomun’s ongoing research on the environmental implications of AI; climate justice and obstruction; and “environmental platform governance” (Solomun, 2023) more broadly.
The ICA 2023 conference theme of Reclaiming Authenticity in Communication invites communication scholars to examine how authenticity has become a variable, rather than a constant, in public discourses and popular culture across the globe, and with what relational, social, political, and cultural implications. focused on Reclaiming Authenticity in Communication.
Sonja Solomun (PhD Candidate, McGill University) is a Faculty Associate at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University. Sonja is a PhD Candidate in the department of Communication Studies at McGill. She works at the intersection of platform governance, AI and climate justice.