A small community in one of Chile’s most water-stressed regions is trying to draw attention to the enormous water footprint of artificial intelligence chatbots. To do so, it has come up with the novel idea of replacing AI with “human intelligence” for 24 hours.

Residents of the community of Quilicura, a small commune located just northwest of Chile’s capital city Santiago, have created what they describe as a “human-powered alternative” to AI chatbots. The project, known as Quili.AI, will swap out large language models for the expertise of real humans, and it’s inviting people from across the world to submit questions that they’d normally ask a machine.

With Quili.AI, prompts that would normally go through an energy-intensive data center will instead be answered directly by one of the residents of Quilicura. They won’t be sitting in front of Google either, but will instead draw on their lived experiences, cultural knowledge and basic common sense to answer each prompt to the best of their ability. For 24 hours, people will be able to ask questions and receive answers in real time without relying on cloud-based servers and vast cooling systems.

The project, led by a cultural organization called Corporación NGEN, aims to draw attention to the problems caused by AI’s enormous thirst for water. It says Quilicura is one of hundreds of water-stressed communities around the world that are going to suffer immensely from the proliferation of AI chatbots.

The problem is that every single chatbot interaction results in water being consumed by data center cooling systems. Though this is invisible to most users, the impact is significant, since a single large data center typically consumes between 1 million and 3 million liters of water every single day.

Globally, AI is believed to consume more than the 450 billion liters of bottled water drunk by humans each year. And the amount is growing annually, causing real concern for water-stressed communities that are now being forced to compete for an increasingly scarce yet vital resource.

The goal of Quili.AI is to highlight just how much water the average user consumes when interacting with AI chatbots on a daily basis. When users submit a question, the platform will estimate how much water each query would have consumed had it been directed at a conventional LLM.

Corporación NGEN said it’s not against AI and it’s not trying to stop it. Rather, what it wants to do is encourage people to be more responsible about how and when they use the technology. It points to various viral social media trends that encourage people around the world to engage in “casual prompting.”

For example, it calculated that one global wave of AI-generated self-portraits that did the rounds on Instagram a few weeks ago consumed more than 200 million liters of water in less than a week. That’s around the same amount of water that would be consumed in one week by a city with 125,000 residents.

It also hopes to spark a serious discussion about how AI systems should scale up, especially in regions of the world that are already under pressure from drought and water shortages, as part of a push for clearer environmental standards for data centers in Chile and beyond.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research told SiliconANGLE that the energy and resource demands of AI are so enormous that it’s worth supporting the Quilicurans’ push for more responsible use of the technology. “Human intelligence can indeed be a replacement for AI in some situations, but it all depends on the quality of the responses,” he said. “Quili.AI is in some ways analogous to buying carbon credits to offset a flight cost, but it’s a nice idea and we’ll see how much attention it gets and whether or not it can inspire something more permanent.”

Quili.AI will go live at 8 a.m. EST on Jan. 31, when Quilicuran residents will be on hand for exactly 24 hours, ready to respond to any question, whether someone’s asking about the impact of AI technology, or simply wants a human perspective on whatever problems they may be facing.

More than just a novelty, Quili.AI serves as a timely reminder that we don’t need to, and probably shouldn’t always, rely on AI to provide the answers to our questions. Human intelligence is a perfectly viable alternative that can provide knowledge, fresh perspectives and a profound understanding of context – all without demanding a single drop of precious water.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Meta AI