Claims that AI can help fix climate dismissed as greenwashing

Tech companies are being accused of greenwashing (falsely claiming environmental benefits) by conflating traditional machine learning (a type of AI that learns patterns from data) with energy-intensive generative AI (systems that create new text, images, or video). A report analyzing 154 statements found that most claims about AI helping combat climate change refer to older, less resource-heavy machine learning methods rather than the modern chatbots and image generators that consume massive amounts of electricity in data centers.