About 50 members 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 and water usage of artificial intelligence data center

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24577617

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.

  • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    4 hours ago

    It still bugs me how our vocabulary just immediately goes out the window to market this shit.

    • NOTHING is powered by AI. And unless some poor fucker’s cranking away on a standing bicycle turbine or something, it’s not powered by humans either. It’s powered by whatever’s giving their grid power - solar, wind, nuclear, dinosaur juice, that shit.

    • Humans grouped up for the purpose of taking and processing client requests isn’t a fucking ‘chat bot’, it’s a call center. This concept isn’t new or novel in any way.

    • Even “AI” itself has become synonymous with ‘computer generated’. Intelligence that’s artificial still only exists in science fiction/fantasy. We’ve been misusing this term well before shit like LLMs existed - calling shit like NPC pathing in a videogame “AI” which is also stupid… but lately we’ll slap an “AI” sticker on anything with an algorithm. We even moved the goal posts on this one with the new term “AGI” but I guarantee that one will be marketed into meaninglessness in the near future too.

    This post is powered by my phone’s battery and last night’s dinner.