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Inspiration
GPTrees is all about using AI ethically in your day to day life. With the accessibility of GPTs like Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, and many others, 100s of millions of users are prompting daily, with over 400 million weekly users on ChatGPT alone.
While productivity is being revolutionized, the cost is our planet. Each GPT prompt costs on average 10x more energy than a google search, and generating a single image is twice the amount of energy an entire U.S household consumes in a minute. This trend in usage is in direct opposition of the OECD principles on AI, that AI should benefit people and the planet.
These figures are alarming with millions of prompts daily, and as the usage of GPTs is rising, GPTrees focuses on bringing mindfulness back into our AI Usage.
What it does
Focusing on the theme of Invisible AI by providing eco-friendly alternatives to AI Usage, GPTrees is a browser extension that prompts users to consider the impact of their prompts, and to consider alternative search engine results.
When a user visits a GPT site, such as Copilot and ChatGPT, GPTrees intercepts prompts, extracting key words using basic NLP categorization, and provides search results using the user’s default search engine, alongside personalized message that provides the user with information on how much energy their prompt would be using. Should a user proceed to browse the search engine results, coins can be collected to customise and raise a pet within the extension.
The extension protects user privacy by only accessing the user’s prompts locally, and excluding any user search behaviour from persistent storage. For each user, only statistics on their environmental impact are persisted, ensuring that user prompts and search behaviour stays completely private.
How we built it
This is currently a Figma-based prototype developed for the UofT AI Ethics Hackathon 2025.
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest challenges was, as a team, learning to navigate and design in Figma on the fly. Learning to balance GPTree's purpose in protecting the environment by reducing the eco-impact of GPT prompting with a smooth user experience was a challenge, and one we aimed to resolve with a gamified and personalized incentive process.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As a team, we are particularly proud of our collaboration in supporting members of our team less familiar with design tools. As well, exploring ethical AI considerations and learning to consider different values from the perspective of very differing stake-holders was a huge challenge, and one we enjoyed undertaking!
What we learned
Our biggest learning as a team was beginning to explore beyond developing ethical AI models, and into exploring the development of tools that make the current use of AI more ethical and sustainable.
What's next for GPTree
We are aiming to create a Chrome-based browser extension for GPTree at the moment, and are hopeful to extend this to become more accessible by supporting a wider variety of browsers and systems.
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