Nicolas Paries on the ecological impact of AI

The heylow.world founder spoke to us about integrating ethical AI tools into his low-carbon web design studio.

When I first heard about AI I was in awe of what it was capable of, just like everyone else. Then over time the novelty faded and I began to think that most of what these algorithms were creating was really bland and uninteresting. Combined with their environmental impact and the disregard for artist's copyright, I began to doubt whether this technology is something we really need, especially in a time of climate crisis.

Big tech stealing people’s work to pollute our world. Not my thing.

I’d been avoiding using AI completely but when I learnt that exactly.ai was partnering with illustrators and artists I was intrigued.

The first thing which struck me was just how well the exactly.ai website was designed!

Then I saw the available styles, the approach of creating your own model and I thought it was a super powerful tool.

Putting environmental impact to the side, I immediately saw the benefit this could bring to our clients.

For example, I used to work at Precious Plastic - an open-source project driving a community-led, decentralized approach to plastic recycling. They don’t always have the budget to hire an illustrator to make their message more accessible to people. That makes telling your brand’s story difficult because everything has to be done internally.

And when you’re trying to motivate change, story is a powerful tool.

With an exactly.ai model, they would be able to continually generate beautiful illustrations on the fly, allowing them to boost their publicity effortlessly, spread their message and ultimately recruit more people for their mission.

But running a sustainable web design agency means all that any benefit has to be weighed against the environmental impact.

I’ve been constructing a set of proposals for a new client and I really wanted to use exactly.ai for one of the options. However, our client is as environmentally conscious as we are and so I was wary to recommend exactly.ai without knowing about their environmental impact.

When I reached out to exactly.ai they were very responsive with information of what they are doing to mitigate their footprint.

I was happy to learn that exactly.ai have made a number of choices to mitigate their carbon footprint.

Firstly they’ve made the choice to use the PIXART-α model instead of other industry standard tools like Stable Diffusion. PIXART-α was trained for 1/10th of the time of Stable Diffusion. This meant it saw a 90% reduction in carbon emissions and used far less water.

This initial phase of training takes the longest time and accounts for the majority of the environmental cost. But the efficiencies developed by the PIXART-α team extends throughout the whole life cycle of the model. With each custom exactly.ai style requiring about 1% of the time as would be required with Stable Diffusion.

With this new knowledge I felt confident putting forward my proposal involving exactly.ai.

While no AI will ever be impact-free, building ecological websites is about making good choices.

When we’re designing a website to minimise its carbon impact we have to balance our decisions. For example, we will choose to load a font over an image since we can use that font across a number of different pages and by varying the size and placement of typography you are able to get a lot of beauty from a very lightweight format.

We also want to build design and communication tools that last and make clients autonomous.

Making small changes to your design will always minimise your carbon footprint over the long-term compared to a complete overhaul. Maintaining your visual communication is always one of the most difficult, selecting cohesive colours, fonts and images.

When we designed the School of System Change website and branding we set them up with a canva workspace so they are able to design new assets autonomously without needing to return to us. Without the workspace it would be costly for the business and add extra steps to the process of maintaining their website in the long term.

Using exactly.ai in the same way would give our clients complete freedom to create new assets in their style continually, reducing the workload on both our ends and ensuring their website design can last while still feeling current and fresh.

I see exactly.ai as an additional tool like our CMS or design software.

And like with all our tools, we select them with care and consciousness. By supporting the artists whose data the AI is trained on and prioritising the right ecological choices, exactly.ai takes a bold step towards integrating AI responsibly into the creative process—benefiting both our clients and the planet.