About 50 residents of a community outside Chile’s capital tried their hand Saturday to control an entirely human-operated chatbot that can answer questions and take silly photos on command, in a post to highlight the toll on the environment artificial intelligence data centers in the region.
Organizers say the 12-hour project has attracted more than 25,000 requests from around the world.
Asking the Quili.AI website to generate an image of a “sloth playing in the snow” didn’t yield immediate results, as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini would. Instead, someone replied in Spanish to please wait a moment and reminded the user that a human was responding.
Then came a drawing about ten minutes later: a pencil sketch of a cute, cartoonish sloth in a pile of snowballs, with its claws gripping one and about to throw it.
“The aim is to highlight the hidden water footprint behind AI prompts and encourage more responsible use,” said a statement from organizer Lorena Antiman of the environmental group Corporación NGEN.
The answers came from a rotating crew of volunteers working on laptops at a community center in Quilicura, a municipality on Santiago’s urban fringe that has become a data center hub. When asked by an Associated Press reporter about the identity of who created the sloth drawing, the website said it was a local youth who helps with illustrations.
The website responded quickly to questions that tapped into residents’ cultural knowledge, such as how to make Chilean sopaipillas, a fried pastry. When they didn’t know the answer, they walked around the room to see if anyone else knew the answer.
“Quili.AI isn’t about always having an immediate answer. It’s about recognizing that not every question needs an answer,” Antiman said. “If residents don’t know something, they can say so, share their perspective or respond with curiosity instead of certainty.”
She said it is not meant to dismiss the “incredibly valuable” use of AI, but to think more about the consequences of so many “casual prompts” in water-stressed places like Quilicura.
The background behind the campaign is a debate, in Chile and elsewhere, about the high costs of AI use. Computer chips in data centers running AI systems require enormous amounts of electricity and some also use large amounts of water for cooling, with usage varying depending on location and type of equipment.
Cloud computing giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft are among a number of companies that have built or planned data centers in the Santiago region.
Google has argued that the Quilicura data center it switched on in 2015 is the “most energy efficient in Latin America” and has highlighted its investments in water restoration and irrigation projects in the surrounding Maipo River basin. But it facing a lawsuit about another project near Santiago due to concerns about water use.
Chile has suffered a decade of severe drought, which experts say contributed to the drought spread of recent deadly forest fires.
