About 50 residents of a community outside Chile’s capital spent Saturday trying their best to power an entirely human-operated chatbot that could answer questions and make silly pictures on command, in a message to highlight the environmental toll of artificial intelligence data centers in the region.
Organizers say the 12-hour project fielded 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 instantly produce an output, as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini would. Instead, someone responded in Spanish to wait a few moments and reminded the user that a human was responding.
Then came a drawing about 10 minutes later: a penciled sketch of a cute and cartoonish sloth in a pile of snowballs, with its claws clutching one and about to throw it.
“The goal is to highlight the hidden water footprint behind AI prompting 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 in a community center in Quilicura, a municipality at the urban edge of Santiago that has become a data center hub. Asked by an Asso