STUDENTS FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES PROGRAM SHARE THEIR RESEARCH ON FAST FASHION AND GENERATIVE AI

EcoRadio KC is glad to encourage awareness and protection of our world.  Our goal is to ensure our listeners are aware of how we can create a sustainable present for a sustainable future! We experience more extreme temperatures because of global energy increase. As we move to the future, it will take ALL of us to make the world habitable for millennia to come. You can trust that KKFI will strive to broadcast relevant, accurate, and timely information. You share KKFI’s mission of providing an independent voice to information underserved or ignored by mainstream media. Host Terri Wilke with speak with a group of students from the University of Kansas environmental studies program, Kenzie Schubert, Aaron Jones, Kensington Comfort, Nyah Noronha, and Gwen Nelson. For their senior year Capstone project, they have developed our show encompassing what they have learned from their studies.  The topic they have selected is fast fashion and generative AI and how those two are connected. Fast fashion is defined as the rapid production of inexpensive clothing that is designed to quickly move from the store into our closets. Brands are constantly releasing new collections to keep up with trends and encourage consumers to keep buying. The goal isn’t sustainability but rather speed, affordability, and volume.  The students discuss the environmental impacts of this. Generative artificial intelligence is a type of AI that can create new content and ideas, including conversations, stories, images, videos, and music. Today, the students will unpack the environmental footprint of generative AI.  Both the Generative AI and fast fashion industries are similar in the alarming rates of wastes and emissions they produce, in the lack of transparency and regulation they operate under, and in the behaviors of their consumers.  These are both two large systems that many people contribute to daily, without realizing the harm they’re causing by doing so. Tune in to hear what your cheap clothes cost the planet.  Fast fashion is a global supply chain built for speed that is leaving behind waste, toxins, and a trail of environmental wreckage. AI brings promise – and peril. The boom in AI and data centers is driving communities to defend their land, resources, and cultural knowledge from new forms of extraction. Tech companies train their generative AI on vast quantities of text, images, videos, and other online data. The information is typically used without shared agreement or approval. EcoRadio KC supports the work for a future in which humans flourish as members of a thriving ecosphere. We are all in this together and it will take all of us to make the world safe. This will be a great radio hour! “The whole world is one neighborhood.”  Franklin D. Roosevelt