this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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Aren't these data centers built on our land, right next to our homes, using our water and electricity, funded by selling our data (that we didn't consent to), and the profits all go to giant corporations, not us? Fuck 'em. I hope they all get raided and stripped bare...
Wait fr, data centers are the biggest scam to date. They're using profits from people's data (that they didn't consent to give) to build ai models (that use stolen data) that act as chat bots, ai bots, and general slop generators (tainting the data they're using to keep training the models), as well as killing the planet for little gains (there won't be a population to survey if we run out resources to survey that population, aka water and electricity. Not entirely sure about the electricity part, but we're certainly running out of freshwater globally)
From the bottom to the top, it seems more like a sunk cost fallacy than an actual investment towards a profitable invention. How short sighted are those in power that they don't realize 100$ now means 0$ later since we've killed all plant life from global warming, and we can't make cash because we can't make paper. Hell, we might be using water bottles as currency before 2050, if that even scares anyone
And if you plant some bamboo on the property, it REALLY becomes a problem for the data centers.
Nah, plant a protected species.
Around here people use bats. Like the ones with wings. Once they've made a roost it's illegal to bother them
Bats with wings?
i'm not de-winging a bat. it's wrong.
Kudzu friends, nothing can stop that in time
Again, not a protected species, also, don't fucking plant kudzu.
Plant a state and federally environmentally protected species, native to the area. Plant a bunch of them and then report the plants to local protective agencies and environmentalist groups. Do your best to hide the fact that these are transplanted plants.
Plant kudzu and all you're doing is annoying the construction company, forcing them to pave over everything.
Do you believe we should be allowed to run open source / weight LLMs like deepseek locally, for our own gain, even though they too have been indirectly trained on our comments / articles / copyrighted books?
I'm sure everyone will have varying opinions on it, but if these models were fully open-sourced I'd have less of an issue. What does it for me is that these companies were unwilling to pay creators to use their work in the training data, instead choosing to pirate it to create expensive and locked down AI products which they expect us to pay for.
I believe it was logistical impossible. Many books used will probably be scanned and not even be available as ebook or drm protected or out of print. And e.g. Anna's archive has 64,416,225 books and 95,689,473 papers. Too large to even say what is pirated or nor, or buy every book in a lifetime. And if every book costs you ~$10 that's close to a billion dollars upfront. Basically creating LLMs wouldn't have been possible without piracy (or maybe the datasets aren't actually that extensive).
It's hypocritical, but ultimately the same argument for piracy that individuals use: IP laws creates unreasonable restrictions that prevent people from learning (or enjoy culture at a sensible price).
(I assume you're not saying you would need a negotiate a specific license to use a book or a public comment or article for machine learning).
Kinda reminds me of Year Zero by Robert Reid. The whole galaxy full of aliens loves Earth Music but only recently figure the concept of copyright. And how much quintillion moneys they now owe Earth lol.
Is that a genuine question that you want to know the answer for, or is it a setup for calling the person you replied to a hypocrit when they say "yes"?
I'm honestly curious. I generally agree with everything you said except the IP argument.
spoiler
I see a conflict between the argument that training LLMs on publicly visible comments (or books or articles) is stealing, and open weight LLM models. If intellectual property is interpreted like that, it will make free LLMs illegal to use, since the original creators of the training data have not licensed this use (even though this data is publicly readable on websites).I would consider it the worst possible outcome if only the AI corporations would be able to profit from the global treasure of our accumulated knowledge. And I suspect that is what is going to happen because they can lobby for some kind of broad licensing deal and pay them off, but for open source it will not work. I believe that is how they will monopolize AI. Then they will truly have stolen it, because they have taken it away from everybody else.
Courts have unfortunately already decided it's all legal, so it's more of a personal ethical issue now.
Of course. The cat's already out of the bag on that one. That data belongs to the public, not a handful of companies.