Generative AI's Impacts on the Environment: What Can Critical Humanities Scholarship Offer Sociological Inquiry?

ABSTRACT In recent years, there has been a rapid and massive expansion of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and infrastructures. Big AI Tech corporations are vigorously marketing these services in the pursuit of profit, despite their devastating impacts on the environment. A body of sociological inquiry into generative AI technologies is beginning to develop, but most of this research is human‐centric, with few studies focusing specifically on their ecological costs. To meet this gap, this review's aims are threefold: (i) to advance a more‐than‐human theoretical perspective in sociological analyses of generative AI's impacts on the natural world; (ii) to introduce the body of literature in the humanities that has already adopted this critical approach; and (iii) to thereby demonstrate the importance of this scholarship in expanding and deepening sociological inquiry into this topic. Insights from more‐than‐human theory, the digital environmental humanities, critical AI, data and data centre studies, and creative arts‐based work are discussed. This scholarship emphasises the importance of continued interdisciplinary social critique and creative inquiry into the harms posed to the natural world—and by extension, to humans—by generative AI development and use.