Gobble

Inspiration

I'm currently studying environmental science at UTSC, particularly climate change impact and adaptations and have experience working as a backend developer. Front end development and javascript was never my domain but it was something I needed for my project idea. The result? An ironic project. I say ironic, because the purpose of this project is to silently keep a small amount of guilt building in you as you interact more and more with ChatGPT, while this project was made with the use of ChatGPT.

The inspiration is simple, AI is gobbling up our water. It takes an immense amount of water (the study I used says 519 ml per 100 words of AI generation!) to interact with ChatGPT on an everyday level. And while you may choose a subscription that is free on the wallet I want users to be aware of what it's costing environmentally.

What it does

The project is a Chrome plugin that detects how many words ChatGPT generates as you interact with it on a chat session. It converts this into the water usage equivalent (in litres) and shows that in the form of a tracker on the bottom right of your screen. It is also capable of giving you the water amount for old chat sessions if you click on them.

How we built it

It's a very basic three file plugin with a styling sheet, a javascript file for the logic and a constants data dictionary in .json.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge; I'm not too familiar with javascript. Only ever used it for those 101 courses when the first assignment is to design your own webpage with clickable links and a few things changing colors. And I've forgotten everything I ever learned to do with DOM manipulation. But I was able to pull through with ChatGPT and that served as a small case study as I watched my water meter go up. (Definitely builds that guilt!)

This automatically paved the way to the next challenge. If I were more familiar javascript I would have easily integrated image detection as well. In the sense that if you get ChatGPT to generate an image, the water tracker can pick up on that too. Currently, the plugin only tracks how much water was gobbled for text prompts only.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The idea itself, that I was able to pull at the intersection of technology and climate change. As a part of the dev community and climate warming advocacy I'm glad I was able to work for both.

What we learned

Chrome plugins are really not that hard to build. If you have this custom need or idea that you would like to see on your brower... well, you could make it!

What's next for Gobble

Could do with either taking this opportunity to learning front-end development and add quality to my repo, or engage with the community and open Gobble up for pull requests and see where it goes! First thing would be include image prompts gobbling for instance.

Built With

• javascript