Some of their arguments are more than just naive ones.
They argue that LLMs are stealing our culture to feed it back to us. Can we really argue that they didn't make use of everything we wrote and said online to train their data?
Where did you see this? The only claim I saw from the article was that 1 prompt uses 16oz of water, which is obviously false if you do any level of research
I've barely looked into this but I don't understand the water usage thing. Are people under the impression that water is a one-time consumable like a video game, where you "use" it and then it's gone forever?
I've seen people claim that the data centers are creating "unusable" water whatever that means.
Are the datacenters are sending water-filled rockets to Jupiter so we can't use it again?
It's a spectrum, I think a majority of people with that stance just think "AI datacenters consume water" and that's as sophisticated as it gets. A more realistic nuanced take would be that "AI is evaporating water which then rains in the ocean, decreasing our supply of fresh water".
Clearly the water isn't atomized. But where I live, each year nature presents us with a certain amount of water to allocate as we see fit. It's not like the water the golf course uses goes to Jupiter. But you probably don't want to pay to be able to drink it after. Right?
So what's the solution? Another rent-seeking system where any future information an AI learns about the world has to be carefully attributed for the possibility that someone might take a piece. A whole patent-troll/music industry style mass buy up of AI information rights with a team of lawyers sending out DMCA warnings hooked into every harness.
Does it get paid out on training or is it like music where if the model output is vaguely similar to something someone else created they get a royalty.
I find their arguments are less naive than the ones who used to say 5G controls our brains just few years ago. I remember personally back in 2021 when we used 5g to fly drones, very educated individuals claimed they don’t feel ok and are sick because they stood next to the tower for few hours because they heard 5g is bad!! just a normal 5g, not even mmwave or anything similar.
AI can be useful no doubt, I think most of people who are against AI aren’t against the concept itself, they are against the business built around it, the greed that will use AI to destroy the quality of life, the mass surveillance that won’t be possible without AI, destroying rare books for AI training, slopification of everything you see around from texts to images to videos, among other legitimate reasons to hate it. Open ai used to be a non for profit, I don’t think anyone protesting AI now would have issues with the company few years ago, when the main focus was research, solve issues, cure diseases, among many other good reasons.
I'm really hoping AI does not become the next political culture war thing, but I'm afraid it probably already is moving in that direction; though it does at least seem that the dividing lines won't be red vs blue this time.
I think it's a very common human trope to believe that we are in end-times. I imagine the overlap between the people that believe that AI will end humanity and those that believed climate change will end humanity 10 years ago is pretty significant. Before that it was people that believed in the rapture.
Sure one of these things could technically end humanity within our lifetimes. But the fact that the end of humanity has been predicted for as long as humans have been around is telling.
> I think it's a very common human trope to believe that we are in end-times. I imagine the overlap between the people that believe that AI will end humanity and those that believed climate change will end humanity 10 years ago is pretty significant.
Everyone knows why they're building this stuff (to replace labor, and damn the consequences of people who work for a living), and I think that's the root of popular resistance.
Fears of species-ending catastrophe is an elite preoccupation (as the more likely economic catastrophe will leave them relatively unscathed). They also serve to show the utter insanity of the AI labs and the people who work for them: they have these fears but they're building the machines anyway.
The dividing lines always end up red or blue, there must be some kind of "social physics" law which states that these work as two attractors. Will the left or the right will end up rabidly pro-AI/anti-AI? Place your bets! Because you know it will happen.
i've met not a single meatspace human outside of techbros who were in favor of unlimited AI. most of the tech bros even conceeded that it could be terrible for everyone including themselves, but mostly laughed it off as #yolo or "we can't get the Chinese get ahead".
not one of those in favor of AI was making less than 200k a year.
they're already low-key priming people with Zechariah 13:8 -- "two-thirds will be cut off and perish"? -- on places like 8chan, or via "edgy" tuber channels like ssethtzeehtach, and it's not hard to see the writing on the wall if you're an average joe.
I sincerely do hope AI resistance becomes the spark to the class war barrel of gunpowder. Especially given who stands to truly benefit from this technology.
AI is absolutely pervasive at this point. I don't think there is a way to put the cat back in the bag. I am not going so say "unfortunately" because I don't have to write tests anymore and so that makes me happy...
Is water going to be a problem? Yeah, I guess so for a while, until they figure out what to do... but all these protests are so pointless: whales, oil, water, war crimes, I've seen so many over the decades, and not a single one worked, not one.
Congratulations I guess to all that participate and carried on to live a life full of virtue and moral high ground, but in reality, their clothes, their food, their transport, their existence within a system are all going to be somehow linked to AI, if their are not already fully integrated.
I've really been liking the car analogies for AI lately.
Personally i dislike driving, i dont like cars or trucks or traffic, yet i own a car. I can protest cars and they wont go away. We could shutdown the 2 biggest automobile makers and it likely just messes with prices/availability for the general public, but doesnt put the genie back in the bottle, hell we can shut down all car manufacturing and it is the same lack of shutting down driving, it just creates a lack of surplus supply.
All these things are pretty true about AI as well, nothing puts the genie back in the bottle.
What we can do, is try to strive towards electric cars, stop putting lead in fuel, enforce laws so driving becomes safer etc. Same with AI, strive towards greener electricity, find some sort of solution to deal with the absurd noise problem that is pervasive across every single area any generated content touches. Build some structure so intelligence is accessible to the average person rather than only the privileged/governments.
One of the worst things about AI, i think is the timing of it. We have built our modern internet experience into auto suggestions, and have no way to filter out what is and isn't a real person's content, or even higher effort content, and all those suggestions have perverse incentives to GET suggested in the form of ads/clout/whatever. Pair that with the absurd noise problem generated content produces everywhere.
I think the biggest concern for Canada and the EU is that the US and China will work together on a joint "AI non-proliferation" agreement much the same way that nuclear weapons came to be restricted by the countries that already had the capability. This will lead to a de facto "techno-colonization" of the rest of the world between themselves.
Trump and Xi are reportedly discussing this concept in their upcoming summit.
This concern carries within it the assumption that having LLMs gives the parties as much influence as what nuclear weapons do in warfare. An assumption that should probably be checked.
I'm really disappointed by the lack of real information in a lot of these protests. The vast majority of people opposing AI that I've seen online and in real life all cite the same misinformation about water use, data centers creating EMFs that kill birds, etc. And a lot of these people are smart, college educated folks. It just goes to show how powerful memes that reinforce your biases can be.
Is it surprising that people who get most of their information from algorithms tailored by the industry they are protesting are ill-informed about the actual problems those companies are creating?
People can feel the misalignment, but they don't understand it. That's the future we are accelerating towards
These things you list and more have a lot of power even if there's a slight chance of them being true. The average person doesn't see any benefit to a data center near them, so they're unwilling to even risk a single drawback. The best case as they see it is that a new data center will result in no net gain for themselves.
Or they are promoting a language where the lower viscera speak to lower viscera. A zombie-like contagion in which the spreading is through suggestive imagery.
Pornographic enrollment: images towards lower excitement, to enlarge the number of the lowerly excited.
Our machines are now more intelligent than most humans, which would have qualified as "fantasy" as recently as 3 years ago. Clearly some people will only give up on this flawed reasoning exactly when the robot boot is pressed against their throat lmao.
Just because there are fantastical elements to these stories doesn't mean their themes can't be poignant examinations of where the real world is headed.
We're not in a giant simulation, but technology is causing people to lose contact with reality, and our lives increasingly become about keeping a giant "machine" running.
We may not have a SkyNet in charge of our nuclear missiles, but should we not be concerned about AI making life-and-death decisions in war?
This is a pervasive technology that--from most people's perspectives--has primarily negative effects and is promoted primarily by people with negative intentions.
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 33.0 ms ] threadThey argue that LLMs are stealing our culture to feed it back to us. Can we really argue that they didn't make use of everything we wrote and said online to train their data?
How is that any different from what media already did.
Most of Disney's original material was European cultural stories.
I've seen people claim that the data centers are creating "unusable" water whatever that means.
Are the datacenters are sending water-filled rockets to Jupiter so we can't use it again?
Does it get paid out on training or is it like music where if the model output is vaguely similar to something someone else created they get a royalty.
They think this is a doomsday technology. They’re not in the streets over a concern about cultural appropriation in LLM training sets.
AI can be useful no doubt, I think most of people who are against AI aren’t against the concept itself, they are against the business built around it, the greed that will use AI to destroy the quality of life, the mass surveillance that won’t be possible without AI, destroying rare books for AI training, slopification of everything you see around from texts to images to videos, among other legitimate reasons to hate it. Open ai used to be a non for profit, I don’t think anyone protesting AI now would have issues with the company few years ago, when the main focus was research, solve issues, cure diseases, among many other good reasons.
Sure one of these things could technically end humanity within our lifetimes. But the fact that the end of humanity has been predicted for as long as humans have been around is telling.
Everyone knows why they're building this stuff (to replace labor, and damn the consequences of people who work for a living), and I think that's the root of popular resistance.
Fears of species-ending catastrophe is an elite preoccupation (as the more likely economic catastrophe will leave them relatively unscathed). They also serve to show the utter insanity of the AI labs and the people who work for them: they have these fears but they're building the machines anyway.
LLMs are destroying the planet.
i've met not a single meatspace human outside of techbros who were in favor of unlimited AI. most of the tech bros even conceeded that it could be terrible for everyone including themselves, but mostly laughed it off as #yolo or "we can't get the Chinese get ahead".
not one of those in favor of AI was making less than 200k a year.
they're already low-key priming people with Zechariah 13:8 -- "two-thirds will be cut off and perish"? -- on places like 8chan, or via "edgy" tuber channels like ssethtzeehtach, and it's not hard to see the writing on the wall if you're an average joe.
Making hydrogen destroys water, ban it
Is water going to be a problem? Yeah, I guess so for a while, until they figure out what to do... but all these protests are so pointless: whales, oil, water, war crimes, I've seen so many over the decades, and not a single one worked, not one.
Congratulations I guess to all that participate and carried on to live a life full of virtue and moral high ground, but in reality, their clothes, their food, their transport, their existence within a system are all going to be somehow linked to AI, if their are not already fully integrated.
Personally i dislike driving, i dont like cars or trucks or traffic, yet i own a car. I can protest cars and they wont go away. We could shutdown the 2 biggest automobile makers and it likely just messes with prices/availability for the general public, but doesnt put the genie back in the bottle, hell we can shut down all car manufacturing and it is the same lack of shutting down driving, it just creates a lack of surplus supply.
All these things are pretty true about AI as well, nothing puts the genie back in the bottle.
What we can do, is try to strive towards electric cars, stop putting lead in fuel, enforce laws so driving becomes safer etc. Same with AI, strive towards greener electricity, find some sort of solution to deal with the absurd noise problem that is pervasive across every single area any generated content touches. Build some structure so intelligence is accessible to the average person rather than only the privileged/governments.
One of the worst things about AI, i think is the timing of it. We have built our modern internet experience into auto suggestions, and have no way to filter out what is and isn't a real person's content, or even higher effort content, and all those suggestions have perverse incentives to GET suggested in the form of ads/clout/whatever. Pair that with the absurd noise problem generated content produces everywhere.
Trump and Xi are reportedly discussing this concept in their upcoming summit.
People can feel the misalignment, but they don't understand it. That's the future we are accelerating towards
Pornographic enrollment: images towards lower excitement, to enlarge the number of the lowerly excited.
We're not in a giant simulation, but technology is causing people to lose contact with reality, and our lives increasingly become about keeping a giant "machine" running.
We may not have a SkyNet in charge of our nuclear missiles, but should we not be concerned about AI making life-and-death decisions in war?
Protests are more than understandable.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20260917040811/https://montrealg...