{"id":557553,"date":"2026-02-01T01:28:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T01:28:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/557553\/"},"modified":"2026-02-01T01:28:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T01:28:10","slug":"a-chatbot-entirely-powered-by-humans-not-artificial-intelligence-this-chilean-community-shows-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/557553\/","title":{"rendered":"A chatbot entirely powered by humans, not artificial intelligence? This Chilean community shows why"},"content":{"rendered":"

About 50 residents of a community outside Chile\u2019s 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<\/a> data centers in the region.<\/p>\n

Organizers say the 12-hour project fielded more than 25,000 requests from around the world.<\/p>\n

Asking the Quili.AI website to generate an image of a \u201csloth playing in the snow\u201d didn\u2019t instantly produce an output, as ChatGPT or Google\u2019s Gemini would. Instead, someone responded in Spanish to wait a few moments and reminded the user that a human was responding.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal is to highlight the hidden water footprint behind AI prompting and encourage more responsible use,\u201d said a statement from organizer Lorena Antiman of the environmental group Corporaci\u00f3n NGEN.<\/p>\n

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 Associated Press reporter for the identity of who made the sloth drawing, the website responded that it was a local youth who\u2019s helping with illustrations.<\/p>\n

The website responded quickly to questions that drew on residents\u2019 cultural knowledge, like how to make Chilean sopaipillas, a fried pastry. When they didn\u2019t know the answer, they walked around the room to see if someone else did. <\/p>\n

\u201cQuili.AI isn\u2019t about always having an instant answer. It\u2019s about recognizing that not every question needs one,\u201d Antiman said. \u201cWhen residents don\u2019t know something, they can say so, share perspective, or respond with curiosity rather than certainty.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said it\u2019s not designed to reject the \u201cincredibly valuable\u201d uses of AI but to think more about the impacts of so much \u201ccasual prompting\u201d on water-stressed places like Quilicura.<\/p>\n

The backdrop behind the campaign is a debate, in Chile and elsewhere, about the heavy costs of AI usage. Data center computer chips running AI systems require huge amounts of electricity and some also use large volumes of water for cooling, with usage varying depending on location and type of equipment.<\/p>\n

Cloud computing giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft are among a number of companies that have built or planned data centers in the Santiago region.<\/p>\n

Google has argued that the Quilicura data center it switched on in 2015 is the \u201cmost energy efficient in Latin America\u201d and has highlighted its investment in wetlands restoration and irrigation projects in the surrounding Maipo River basin. But it faced a court challenge<\/a> over another project near Santiago over water usage concerns.<\/p>\n

Chile has faced a decade of severe drought, which experts say contributed to the spread of recent deadly wildfires<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"About 50 residents of a community outside Chile\u2019s capital spent Saturday trying their best to power an entirely…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":557554,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,7060,738,64,276,1613,4515,66465,59,65,16282,1612,243774,123137,235115,4217,158,67,132,68,2057,2058],"class_list":{"0":"post-557553","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-alphabet","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-california","13":"tag-central-america","14":"tag-chile","15":"tag-data-management-and-storage","16":"tag-inc","17":"tag-information-technology","18":"tag-laptops","19":"tag-latin-america","20":"tag-lorena-antiman","21":"tag-santiago","22":"tag-send-to-apple-news","23":"tag-south-america","24":"tag-technology","25":"tag-united-states","26":"tag-unitedstates","27":"tag-us","28":"tag-wa-state-wire","29":"tag-washington"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115992782632439226","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/557554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}