AI Protest in Montreal(montrealgazette.com) |
AI Protest in Montreal(montrealgazette.com) |
The pace may have been a little slower, but I doubt that there’d been a fraction as much backlash had they played nice and more consideration been taken. Nobody really cared about data centers until a few hastily implemented ones made nuisances of themselves.
You'd think. Every single person unreasonably skeptical of AI that I know of usually comes from blue echo chambers.
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.
LLMs are destroying the planet.
It is already a political culture war topic.
Ironically, the first things that pops into my mind when I hear that nickname, is back when actually used to be called that, and they showed "Don't Be a Sucker":
> Admonishes Americans that they will lose their country if they let fanaticism and hatred turn them into "suckers." "Let's forget about 'we' and 'they' -- let's think about us!" In the context of the emerging Cold War, this film appears paradoxical - https://archive.org/details/DontBeaS1947 (1945)
"Vaccines and 5G" refer to direct health concerns; "AI" is a shorthand name for "what if" scenarios.
People can feel the misalignment, but they don't understand it. That's the future we are accelerating towards
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?
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?
Pornographic enrollment: images towards lower excitement, to enlarge the number of the lowerly excited.
Trump and Xi are reportedly discussing this concept in their upcoming summit.
Protests are more than understandable.
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.
But lets be honest, we were put into specific spots, we can't just get out.
We were able to just take land and make it ours, if you get put on a planet were everything is owned, the critisism were your food and cloth is coming is not their fault.
Its not pointless. It might have less impact than it should, but its not pointless.
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.
How is that any different from what media already did.
Most of Disney's original material was European cultural stories.
Maybe now the wakeup call is loud enough to actually wake more people?
They think this is a doomsday technology. They’re not in the streets over a concern about cultural appropriation in LLM training sets.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s...
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.
If I bought a cake from your bakery, and then said "I'm going to serve it at my friends' gay wedding!", you couldn't be "hey, no, I don't approve of that". You've already sold me the cake; no take-backsies.
And if I buy a hammer, the hardware store doesn't get to tell me what I'm allowed to build.
But as long as copyright exists, AI training should not get any exception to it. That creates an asymmetry, where AI gets to rip off our work and use it to compete with us, while we don't get to do the same with proprietary works (e.g. software).
I don't want a world in which AI can rip off all of my Open Source code and not respect its license, but I can't take macOS and virtualize it and not care what Apple thinks of that.