Throughout November, we’re inviting all curious CATs to join the 🐱 CAT Generative AI Exploratorium ✨ – a collaborative journey in which you will be able to question, learn, practice, and reflect on the intersection of climate action in tech and generative AI.
As part of the journey, you’ll be able to participate in a series of online sync and async community explorations designed and facilitated by Alja Isaković, CAT volunteer and learning experience designer. The project is funded from CAT mini grants and open to all CAT members, both existing and new.
A 4-part exploration of GenAI & climate action
The CAT Generative AI Exploratorium is a 4-part community exploration that invites you to explore diverse perspectives on how generative AI might support or oppose different types of CAT climate actions.
It’s up to you to choose which action area(s) to focus on. Perhaps you want to explore whether generative AI might help you green your craft. Or maybe you would like to speak up in your company or advocate & influence externally to help your colleagues and other tech workers think about the environmental impacts of generative AI tools they use. Or, quite possibly, you don’t have a goal defined yet, and will use the Exploratorium to discover new quests or find a fellowship.
Either way, you’ll get the opportunity to explore the intersection of climate action in tech and generative AI from different perspectives:
- Part 1: 💬 QUESTIONING – Nov 4–10: How do you feel about generative AI? What questions do you have? What questions aren’t being asked, what perspectives are being ignored? [Read the recap]
- Part 2: 📚 LEARNING – Nov 11–17: Where can you learn more about the questions you have? How have you already experimented with generative AI? What can you learn from others? [Read the recap]
- Part 3: 🐱 PRACTICING – Nov 18–24: How might you take concrete action based on what you’ve learned? How are others taking action?
- Part 4: 🌊 REFLECTING – Nov 25–30: What have we learned and what questions remain? What impacts do our actions have? What would you like to explore next?
And while I, as the facilitator, will be guiding the exploration through each of the four parts throughout the four weeks in November, you’re always welcome to drop in & out at your own pace based on your current needs, interests, and availability. Your journey through the Exploratorium will be unique, but there are additional collaborative learning benefits in following the journey path together.
How can I join?
There are two complementary ways to participate:
- join any or all of the four exploratory online sessions and/or
- join the discussions and activities through the #gen-ai-exploratorium channel in the CAT Slack community.
The online sessions will take place on four consecutive Wednesdays in November – Nov 6, Nov 13, Nov 20, Nov 27 – at 6 PM CET / 5 PM UK / noon EST / 9 AM PST. You can check your local time, RSVP and add the sessions to your calendar by visiting the Exploratorium calendar. Each 1.5h long session will be lightly guided, with the majority of time spent in open exploration and small group discussions.
And don’t worry if you won’t be able to join the online sessions. While the sessions will not be recorded, you can also participate asynchronously by contributing to the collaborative Mural whiteboard and joining the discussions in the Slack channel. I’ll also post a recap of each session on the CAT blog, so you can catch up if you skip a session.
To make sure you don’t miss the start, you can already join the Slack channel to be notified when the Exploratorium officially opens, and RSVP to events to add them to your calendar. You can also use the Slack channel to ask any additional questions about the project.
Who is the Exploratorium for?
The Exploratorium welcomes any tech worker who is interested in how generative AI might support or hinder their climate action, regardless of role and expertise. Whether you’re a product designer eager to learn more about generative AI, an ML engineer exploring model efficiency, a web developer using code copilots, or even an AI skeptic not using generative AI at all, this exploration journey is for you.
The only prerequisite you need is curiosity, no technical background necessary.
The online sessions are open to all, although we do invite you to join the CAT community so you can also access the Slack channel and other resources.
What the Exploratorium is NOT
While the Exploratorium is a place to explore diverse perspectives, it is NOT the right place if you’re looking for:
- A course in prompt engineering – although you might use it to learn how to elicit more diverse perspectives from your chats with different LLMs.
- A set of lectures by experts – instead, everyone will be invited to actively contribute and explore diverse perspectives with curiosity.
- Quick and easy answers – you’ll get the most out of the experience if you’re willing to question a lot and not rush to conclusions and solutions.
Why is the Exploratorium needed?
This year, the environmental impacts of LLMs like ChatGPT and other generative AI tools have been getting more coverage and interest. It’s certainly a topic that often comes up for discussion in our CAT Slack. As a CAT Volunteer, I’ve been helping collect articles and other resources on the topic. Plenty of great articles and guides have also been written by CAT members.
While most of us aren’t directly involved in machine learning and training generative AI models, we are being challenged to figure out how, when, and whether to use generative AI tools in our work. Or even asked to add generative AI capabilities to our products. These challenges usually don’t have simple answers, especially when we account for the significant environmental footprint of large generative AI models.
While it might be tempting to dismiss generative AI as a fad, generative AI tools are already transforming many tech roles. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple, and others are now rushing to integrate generative AI into the operating systems of our devices, browsers, code editors, and other apps. As the AI race continues at breakneck speed, I think we should take a step back and collectively explore what generative AI is and what it is not, especially in the context of our climate action.
Join & invite your friends
So, if you want to explore the intersection between climate action in tech and generative AI beyond the headlines and the hype, I hope you’ll join us in the CAT Generative AI Exploratorium and bring your friends and colleagues along.
The CAT Generative AI Exploratorium will run from November 4 and end on November 30 – the two-year anniversary of ChatGPT. If you don’t want to miss the start, remember to join the Slack channel and to RSVP to online sessions. If you’re not a CAT member yet, you might want to join the CAT community beforehand.
I can’t wait to see what questions and perspectives you bring to the Exploratorium!
“Generative AI isn’t just a tool for answers; it’s a mirror for the questions we dare to ask and the perspectives we bring to the conversation.” — ChatGPT
About me
Over the past two decades, I’ve helped startups, larger organizations, educational institutions – but mostly people –, improve how they build, learn, and think about digital technologies. As the co-founder of Tethix, a social impact venture dedicated to closing the ethical intent to action gap in product development, I’ve been observing the rise of generative AI with a mix of dread, excitement, and other emotions. I am worried about the environmental impacts of generative AI, I believe that machine learning has an important part to play in the necessary transition, but I also hope that AI companions might help us collaborate better and guide us towards taking climate action. And from the conversations I’ve been having, I know I am not alone in having these types of mixed feelings.
That’s why I decided to use my expertise in learning experience design to envision an exploration journey that would give us, tech workers who care about climate action, an opportunity to explore all of these and many other perspectives together. To share our feelings, thoughts, questions, learnings, but also to explore how we might take concrete actions that lead to preferable futures. Regardless of where you fall in the spectrum of responses to generative AI, I hope you’ll join me and other CATs in this collective sense-making exercise.
This project is part of the Mini Grants program. If you would like to apply for funding during the next round of mini grants, please fill out this form (projects are evaluated every three months). To learn more about the process and how we evaluate projects, check out our Mini Grants Outline page.