AI’s Impact on the Environment: How Acting Pal is Trying to Help

At Acting Pal, we believe strongly that AI can be a force for good in the creative industry. But irrespective of how and where AI is being used, it comes at a significant cost to the environment. We feel it is important to be transparent about these costs and clearly explain them to our users.

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The Problem: AI’s Carbon Footprint

Every time you upload a script or generate an AI voice, it takes a powerful data centre to process that request.

On top of that, the models behind these requests are trained on immense amounts of data, which also requires huge energy consumption. So, by making requests, you are contributing to the demand for training and running these energy-intensive models.

As it stands, these energy requirements mostly rely on sources that emit carbon into the atmosphere. Most AI today runs on a fossil-leaning grid. In 2024, electricity physically used by data centres was ~56% fossil-based (coal + gas); US data-centre power is gas-heavy, and China’s is coal-heavy (IEA).

For further context, per-query energy use is substantially higher than search. Early comparisons put a text LLM prompt at ~10× the energy of a standard Google search (Polytechnique Insights; Data Center Frontier; The Wall Street Journal; The Washington Post).

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Acting Pal’s Commitment and Pledge

There are active efforts across the industry to reduce the energy intensity of training models, and some companies are making pledges to offset their carbon footprint - indeed, in the AI self taping space Rafy (Rafy.com) has already led the charge!

At Acting Pal, we believe that every company offering AI services to consumers should play an active role in offsetting their carbon footprint.

We are pledging to work with trusted charities to ensure that anything Acting Pal is responsible for emitting into the atmosphere will be offset through tree planting and rainforest restoration.

• Our pledge is to entirely offset our carbon footprint by the end of 2026.
• From the start of 2026, we will begin this process.
• As a user of Acting Pal, you will be able to see within the app each month how many trees we have planted, how close we are to offsetting our total carbon emissions, and how many trees your individual subscription has been responsible for planting.

See also

• Will AI Replace Actors?
• How Actors Will Benefit from AI
• Hollywood Already Uses Generative AI