Not saying it's a 1:1 comparison but it puts it in perspective.
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.
The fact that the Panama Canal uses ~2 billion(!) gallons of water a day never gets mentioned.
What does canard mean in this context?
If the median query on the internet is now and forever answered by an AI bot, humans could just as easily become really important as an "authentic" source of answers.
The answers to almost every search are already out there, but we made the public internet so toxic and user hostile, you now need a whole new layer of AI to sift through the bullshit, ads, and clickbait.
I don’t think for a second that AI will not go the same hellish direction.
If this really is the case, then there's an engineering solution here to re-train people by answering questions with search results first, leaving AI reconciliation for those cases where someone would be clicking the "next page" button or scrolling further.
Of course, that may not align with the perverse incentives driving whoever is behind each bot.
> To make the impact visible, and to help draw visibility to the problem, the residents from Quilicura became “human A.I.,” for a day. Answering prompts, creating content with local artists, and completing other tasks manually.
Just read the content my dude. It took me 3 minutes.
The difference is even larger if you look at the state of the art: "As of November 2026, the state of the art is direct-to-chip liquid cooling combined with closed-loop dry coolers. This allows a data center to operate with essentially zero water consumed for cooling, even for high-density AI infrastructure."
You might not want to put an older/less efficient data center in a very dry area, but other than it seems quite reasonable.
a) datacenters don't use water for computation, they use it for cooling
b) the water isn't obliterated, it's still there
c) the water can be recycled and rereleased into the ecosystem, which it mostly is.
Chile is a good place, if you look at the submarine cable map (which allows connections over the internet between regions) you'll see that in the west part of South America, Chile is the only country with a submarine cable that goes to Asia, and is going to be working in 2028 and Chile in general over land also has a very good internet connection and is very advanced technologically.
I like the initiative as a life-affirming activity, but spreading falsehoods about water usage is not a good thing. Lying and deceiving makes the world a worse place. This sentence could just as easily read:
""BECAUSE OF [Quili], COUPLED WITH AN ONGOING CLIMATE CRISIS, CHILE IS FACING A SEVERE DROUGHT EXPECTED TO LAST UNTIL 2040."
Without explaining what proportion of the drought comes from the climate crisis, or the mechanism by which data centers cause drought, you could substitute almost anything for [Quili] here.
The water hype needs to go. It's caught on with people who get their news off tiktok, but we need to have better epistemic models if we want to actually make the world a better place.
Why focus on epistemic models instead of ethical ones?
In real life, in Chile, who "stole all the water" ? How did they "steal" the water?
It seems the villain here could be the Chilean government, for prioritizing the tech economy over the people at a time when it matters most.
> 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. Ultimately I think it risks falling between performative and exploitative.