Asklemmy

There's a lot of anti-AI hate on this platform. Almost to the point of it being a religion.

There's a lot of justified hate, outside of Lemmy as well. The irony of saying it's like a religion when there's people worshipping their AI out there is notable.

No. It's just the latest way of giving instructions to a computer.

While that's sort of true, it's obfuscating what actually happens. You're technically just giving instructions to a computer, but it's not like a software program on your personal computer. You're sending a message out to a very large computer to do a very complicated large program, while a lot of other people are doing so.

The "bad" or "evil" part of AI is mostly due to the large players (aka "Big AI") spending literally over $1 trillion so far on data centers and hardware.

There's more than that. There's the ethical concerns of making pornography of people without their consent, especially minors. There's art theft. There's people losing jobs. There's the environmental issues. There's the mental issues. There's the problems with people trying to get jobs. There's the drop in reading comprehension. There's the people being driven to kill or kill themselves over it. There's people falling in love with their AI and avoiding other people for it. There's the noise. The water usage. The electrical pull. The Ponzi scheme funding.

You're trying to preemptively say that these complaints are only about the big AI, but these are inherent for all of them.

There's so much demand for their services that they're having to build their own—often dirty, fossil fuel—power plants just to power it all.

Source? People are already having to pay more for electricity. Tahoe is about to not have any electricity because of the AI center.

Also those sus dash marks.

the heat dissipation required 0.5 liters of water from the cooling pond next to the power plant, not potable/drinking water).

Ok, but where do you think that water was acquired to fill that pond? It's from local sources. Closed loop systems aren't actually great for the environment, either. You remember the water cycle? Where water evaporates, turns into clouds, turns into rain, then dries up and repeats itself? Well, there's only a specific amount of water on the planet, and only some of it is usable by humans. Data centers and AI centers using closed loop systems take a huge chunk of water out of that water cycle. With global warming in the mix, we're starting to run out. Oh, and data centers and AI centers don't disclose how much water they are taking out of the local system, so we can only guess, but the best estimate is summed up as "a fuck load".

However, it's actually all the people and businesses using AI that uses up all that energy. The biggest, most power-hungry step is "inference" which is the point where the LLM tries to figure out what you just asked of it.

Saying "it doesn't use power unless you use it" isn't really an argument against it's power usage. And saying it uses more power after it's started is worse.

The important point here is that AI is actually being used.* There's real demand for it!

That demand, though, isn't profitable. That's why companies have been upping their rates and the building of AI centers have been stalling.

The demand for AI services is so great that they can't build data centers fast enough.

That's not why people have been trying to build a lot of data centers. There's a lot of speculative investing going on, and there's a lot of people trying to get onto the ground floor. So these people are dumping a crapton of money into it, trying to get ahead of everyone else.

This isn't coming from some bandwagon, or anti progress/tech sentiment. Ai is just bad.