plant pal

Inspiration

There is no doubt that generative AI has become an extremely important tool, shaping the way we learn and impacting our daily lives. As we sat in the opening ceremonies and heard all the excitement as people spoke about AI for their projects, we began to think about the other side of the story. Millions of people everyday use chatGPT, for example, for small tasks, and are often not aware of the compute power it takes to run each query. We decided to create this project as one of the ways we can raise awareness about the environmental impact of generative AI, and open up the conversation for those who may not be aware. AI is an amazing tool that can be leveraged for very exciting things. Our goal is to not stop people from using it, but rather to spread awareness while using it! Enjoy!

What it does

When activated, our chrome extension will notice when someone submits a query to chatGPT, and subsequently perform calculations to determine the environmental impact of the query. The extension popup shows progress bars that increment with each query, counting up towards metrics that contextualize the environmental impact in fun ways: progress towards 1 bottle of water, 1 lightbulb on for an hour and bringing one electric kettle to boil.

How we built it

--> we used figma to design our prototype, icons and graphics --> we first created a react app and modified the structure and files to configure it towards a chrome extension --> we used the chrome extensions api and javascript to monitor chatgpt and notify us when someone submits a queury and increment a counter

Challenges we ran into

Basically every technology we used was new to most of the team, so getting started was the most difficult part. It was especially tricky to set up the react project and package it as a chrome extension! (manifest.json, we're coming for you...)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was everyone's first time building a chrome extension, so we are honestly quite excited to be able to demo! We are proud that we were able to get a functional chrome extension that is able to receive input from what the user is doing on the page, and use it to update the popup.

What we learned

We all learned how to build a chrome extension, and some members were able to learn new languages and frameworks like JavaScript and React. In addition, we leveraged Figma to create prototypes and flowcharts of our product.

What's next for plant pal

It would be great to do more research to get more accurate measures on how much compute power a GPT query uses depending on its model, size of query,... We would also love to include a dynamic element that displays different UNfun facts about the negative impact of AI on the environment.

SOURCES

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271 This research paper was very interesting, and taught us a lot about water consumption used to keep data centres that process AI commands from overheating. We got our figures for water consumption from here. (I would recommend giving this a read, it's super interesting!)

https://piktochart.com/blog/carbon-footprint-of-chatgpt/ This source was used to determine the CO2 consumption of a chatgpt query.