Our view on AI

• KindScore uses AI to turn large amounts of public information into a sustainability rating.
• This is the only way to provide a rating for every tourism activity with an online presence.
• We measure our use of AI and keep it extremely efficient.
• Our view is that KindScore is a responsible use of AI, where the benefits of more sustainable travel far outweight the relatively small costs.
• We do not agree with model development and data center construction continuing at its current pace.

Our firm belief is that enabling travellers to choose more sustainable operators is a sustainability benefit that vastly outweighs the cost of running the KindScore ratings.

AI is uniquely powerful as a tool for reading large amounts of public information from search results and distilling it into the most important points.

It means we can provide an estimated sustainability impact rating for every travel activity with an online presence, which would not be possible otherwise.

AI is not the only technology with high potential energy consumption. A lot of energy is used in digital infrastructure, including data centers, when we watch Netflix, TikTok or Instagram, make video calls or even search the web.

AI is one of several digital tools in the pipeline that creates a KindScore rating for an activity.

We endeavour to keep our use of AI extremely efficient. This matters because it's a technology with the potential to use a lot of energy. Staying efficient also keeps our costs manageable, so as independent founders we have a real incentive to be responsible. We also use prompt caching and result caching to further reduce AI use.

Like every activity we do on the internet, AI uses data centers. This isn't automatically a bad thing, but rapid development and enormous use of AI by large corporations is driving huge demand for new data center construction, and often at the cost of the environment.

One example of data center construction that we see as irresponsible is from Meta, who are building a 5-gigawatt data center almost the size of Manhattan, largely to serve their social media algorithms and their push for users to generate AI videos, which is extremely energy-intensive.

Training new and more powerful AI models not only increases demand for data centers, but may also create a far-reaching range of risks for our society.

While the topic of frontier AI model development is much too large to discuss here, we will state that we don't support this development continuing at its current pace, due to legislation failing to keep up and the increasing dangers of more powerful models being used irresponsibly.

KindScore uses Claude Haiku, an existing small model that is exceptionally useful and efficient. We do not require or rely on further training of AI models or construction of new data centers, and it is our firm belief that governments should be taking more decisive action to slow and regulate both of these processes.