It is. You have people thinking there's somehow gonna be water scarcity in the coming years due to data centers using up too much when that is not based on anything real or associating climate change with them letting off the actual major players for that off the hook. The water thing in particular is seemingly the most common thing brought up even though the amount of water used by them is miniscule in the grand scheme off things. Even disregarding that a lot of the water isn't even "wasted" caused it's being used in closed loop cooling systems.

There are very real concerns like the impact in warfare but there's so much fake nonsense going about so again if you're gonna be posting about this subject so much you should really educate yourself about it and learn what criticisms are based on facts and which aren't and about the benefits of the technology to get a more nuanced view. If nothing else when a study aligns with your view on something don't just assume it's trustworthy and properly look into it first before sharing it.

There will be water scarcity, just like there already is in First Nations communities and parts of Africa. Then there's the noise from data centres that will drive animals away from their homes, leading them to try and survive in human communities. You know what that looks like? Here's a prime example.

That doesn't change the fact that data center water usage is tiny. Do you any source for noise being a relatively significant issue for data centers? Cause the US has 4-5k of them currently but that's nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of factories.

There is an entire city in Nevada that will be without power in a year because the energy provider chose the Data Center over a city of people. You need to remember that power is also for hospitals and people at home with medical devices. Not to mention AC for Nevada heat. It only takes one for it to be ok to happen to other towns and cities. (mutliple local news videos on this) It's already taken water away from just houses a few years ago. They go where the promise of profit goes, not your needs. So go ahead be a fucking dipshit and make your Nintendo AI images or AI memes. It's only fucking the planet and people, including yourself. Go ahead be a frog in boiling water.

As usual you point the finger at industry that was there before AI to distract from AI's glaring flaws.

^THIS!! Everybody who advocates for AI and data centers has such a thick skull it's a wonder they have any cognitive functionality. The only good data center is one that's been demolished and never to be rebuilt.

I have been taking a graduate course on AI-Human Interaction & Teaming, and one of the visuals from a paper we had to read and review had a part where a regression analysis was conducted with an dependent variable of "Willingness to Team with AIs in Multiplayer Online Games." 

Notice the correlation coefficient for "Pre-existing Attitudes Toward AI" lol. 

Surprisingly, this research was done in 2020 - 2021 before LLM-based chatbots were mainstream and when generative image models gave messy outputs. Didn't realize people had strong views on AI before Midjourney & ChatGPT. 

But anyway, I think this research explains this thread well. People's views on this topic are pretty much cemented to what they are when they first make them. 

I know as someone who is AuDhD and has SPD. AI stuff messes with my head and triggers a immediate anger. Not for any in depth reasons like the planet or Data Centers. Just when you have a brain wired like this you need to know what is real all the time or exactly what is happening with reassurance. Your brain deludes you sometimes and reading people is almost impossible socially for me. So when fake stuff like AI videos. The brain goes into red alert and fight or flight mode. I don't have Psychosis but my brain wants to seeing AI stuff. It's not a conscious thing, just an automatic reaction. Even before AI this is why I hate celebrities,News, Talk shows and many other things of a similar nature. People are pretending their phoney bullshit is who they are. It's different when I watch a movie as I know they are acting to tell a story. AI is 10000000x worse for me. When AI started exploding I had mental breakdowns trying to figure out what is real or not. I don't do that anymore but still have micro panic attacks. I am not alone either a lot out there like me. Some far worse off.

Tbh I am just waiting for someone to go Noid situation. For those unaware in the 80s and early 90s Dominoes Pizza had a claymation mascot of a man dressed as a bunny. He was called The Noid. Tagline was Avoid the Noid. Well a man with mental problems who had Noid in his name thought they were targeting him. So he took a restaurant hostage. After that they dropped the mascot.

^This is me, other than hating celebrities in general.

My views of AI have changed over the decades. I studied AI in University in the 90s, thought it was the greatest thing at the time. Finally a way to maybe understand human consciousness, solve world hunger etc. Well that's still far far seemingly infinitely far away.

Instead AI progress has turned into brute force search / correlation engines. Even if AI at some point passes The Turing Test or whatever, we still won't have a clue how it works... 

The 'AI' I worked with was mostly deterministic, fuzzy logic and neural networks. It all ran on simple PCs, no need for data centers. LLMs are not trustworthy, first of all because the absorb everything without any understanding of what is real, fake, fact, truth, lies, propaganda, fantasy etc. It's SQL on steroids yet without accountability, introducing 'hallucinations', false answers. 

Plus when I was young the tech world wasn't controlled yet by a couple huge corporations that merely see humans as data sources to exploit.

Now AI is used to monitor, censor and kill people, nope I no longer support AI. You can't rely on it yet idiots in power do, see the 175 people killed in Minab school bombing. Plus AI is only accelerating climate change with the footprint of data centers, not solving it.

And as @Leynos said, AI fakes are a really fucking huge issue. You can't believe your eyes anymore, which is exactly what the elite want. George Orwell rolls over in his grave.

Just want to point out that "AI" today can be arbitrarily deterministic in the sense of getting the exact same output for a given input by setting the temperature hyper-parameter = 0 or even a low decimal value. Many AI workloads can run on local hardware; I train smallish CNNs and VIT-CNN hybrids on my local PC with training sessions being like 10 hours, as an example; online learners are also broad research field; and Local LLMs are pretty popular and capable relative to proprietary models, even if they don't top the benchmarks. I'd actually argue that open-source is in a much better relative position in the 2020's than in the 1990's, when even things like compilers were proprietary and compute was even more centralized. The big difference is the share of the overall economy that these companies compose is much larger than then. 

I also think "brute-force search" isn't quite what is happening. Reinforcement-learning isn't brute-force and that is how "LLM's" have been post-trained since late-2024. In RL, paths are pruned based on the reward function and not traversed exhaustively. I also don't think the heuristics learned in the pre-trained base models are really "brute force" either. Having said that I don't think LLMs are human-like intelligence though. "AGI" probably will be achieved through an array of casual models like LEWM that interact with generative models in yet-to-be-known ways, and there probably will have to be some online learner involved as well.