PromptLite

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Inspiration

At UVA, AI tools like ChatGPT are used by nearly everyone weekly. However, the environmental cost of these technologies—specifically water and energy consumption—is often hidden. As of February 2025, OpenAI has reported an estimated 400 million users that prompt an average of 5 times a day. A single 100 word GPT-4 response requires roughly 519 ml of water and 0.14 kWh of electricity.

What it does

PromptLite is a Chrome extension designed to raise awareness and promote accountability of the impact of AI by promoting better prompting and optimizing output. By tracking and displaying the environmental impact of AI usage, PromptLite empowers UVA students and professors to make more sustainable choices. While it may not directly impact UVA's total resource consumption, reducing the footprint of AI tools used daily on campus is a critical step toward fostering a culture of sustainability at UVA. Users will find PromptLite to be a smooth prompting experience that copies their prompt directly to the clipboard.

How we built it

Our extension was built using Vite + TailwindCSS on the React framework.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were with the storage and manipulation of values. Since it is a Chrome application, we found it difficult to be able to find a reliable way to store information that was taken from the webpage. Another difficulty that we ran into was with the DOM of chatgpt.com. Many parts of the website are hard to manipulate and work around without internal code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We produced a fully functional UI on all ends that allows prompting to be more accessible to users while promoting our intended goal of making responses more resource efficient while retaining information.

What we learned

The learning process was extensive for this project. Many of us did not have a very strong foundation in javascript and/or were not familiar with the React framework. This project also required us to understand many facts about AI's contribution to environmental waste.

What's next for PromptLite

The next steps for PromptLite are to improve the backend logic to store user information and make them aware of their consistent move in the right direction. We look to improve our understanding of Chrome and posting it on the extension store for other users to enjoy.