Chilean town becomes human AI for a day to expose data centers' water use
Quili AI
Quilicura, Chile, hosts one of the largest concentrations of AI data centers, which cool their servers with water from the drought-stricken Maipo River basin. On January 31, more than 40 residents answered over 25,000 prompts by hand as "human AI," fielding chats from 68 countries and reaching 71.6 million people in a single day. The initiative by Fundación Avina and Corporación NGen makes the hidden water cost of casual AI use visible.
It is inconceivable to think that someone casually using A.I. to create funny images in NYC or Berlin, can affect the water supply in Quilicura, Chile.
- jrflo
Very fun idea. I do think this puts the water argument into a bit more perspective. Your average person should drink ~3L of water per day, or about 22mL per 11 minute average-length chat that Quili quotes on their site. It's hard to pin down exactly how much water AI uses, but something on the order of 5mL per interaction seems reasonable [1]. So the people doing this are using about 4x more water than an AI model would. Of course, it does matter what happens to that water, whether it turns into water vapor or urine and how much of that water re-enters the water cycle, but it's an interesting comparison.
- jimmyjazz14
This is a neat idea but some of the claims on that website seem extremely propagandistic. I'm not particularly gung ho about datacenters but if datacenters are causing water issues the solution is to shine a light on alternative technologies to solve the problem. Perhaps Chile could become a leader in building cleaner datacenters but thats not the goal I am taking from this initiative.
- vessenes
I love the advocacy angle here - it's super well executed. However
> SINCE THE EARLY 2010s, QUILICURA HAS BECOME A MAJOR HUB FOR A.I. DATA CENTERS THAT USE LARGE AMOUNTS OF WATER TO COOL DOWN SERVERS. BECAUSE OF THAT, COUPLED WITH AN ONGOING CLIMATE CRISIS, CHILE IS FACING A SEVERE DROUGHT EXPECTED TO LAST UNTIL 2040.
I do not believe that data centers (Were there AI datacenters in 2010? No) are causing a severe drought in Quilicura that will extend until 2040. I believe climate change could be causing such a drought, and I believe a drought is a terrible thing.
Estimates of water used for cooling are about 0.3mL of water per chatbot query; the 25,000 prompts that this really awesome and fun project answered resulted in 7.2 liters of water "saved" from use as cooling. I would imagine these 40 people drank significantly more than that during the day.
I put "saved" in quotes because no water is destroyed during datacenter cooling. Some (the parts sent to open evaporative coolers) goes back in the atmosphere, and I imagine disperses over a pretty wide region. The rest of it is recycled locally, whether into the water table, or I would guess more likely back into cooling another round of queries.
Anyway, it's fun. But I guess I'd prefer something that is more honest about the actual uses and cycles here -- it doesn't do a local community (or a global one) any good to misinform them about the situation; to their point the situation locally sounds like it could be pretty dire. Ult […]
- biggestlou
This canard about AI and water usage really just isn't going to go away, is it?
- nater5000
This is a "fun" art piece, I guess. But it doesn't make any sense to me. I think part of my confusion comes from this site itself. It really presents this information in a very convoluted and meandering way. Like, it reads like a sales pitch, but it also doesn't provide any of the most interesting information they have available (like the contents of actual chat sessions).
It's also not clear what this aims to prove or highlight. I'm willing to just accept it in the abstract (it's like AI, but with humans), but the whole site is focusing on "saving water" when I don't see how this... event(?) does that in any shape or form. I guess it's just a way to get visibility on the problem? But it does so by pretending like humans are an actual viable alternative to AI for these kinds of chats? Is this supposed to be ironic or tongue-in-cheek? Am I missing the joke?
I don't know. It kind of seems like there was some original intent that got lost along the way, and they tried their best to pull together what they had into some sort of message. But it's lost on me.