"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
A curious response on the lemmy bug tracker... https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/issues/413
Disclaimer: please don't go and harrass anybody, if you happen to reach out to anybody in any way please be calm and constructive.
Haven’t read the actual report they are quoting but the arguments of energy, land and water use (the ones they quote) are probably the weakest arguments against AI I’ve heard.
Agreed that land and water are smaller compared to agriculture, but the electricity usage change is significant. The LLM boom is unlike prior datacenter workloads. The electrical demand is far higher due to the more power hungry chips and running them at full utilization. It's projected to go from 5% to 15% of all US electrical demand in quite a short amount of time
This is delaying the closures of fossil fuel plants (here's an example of 15 coal plants in the US last year), and starting to rely more heavily on generators to install capacity faster despite solar/wind being far cheaper
The report seems interesting if you want to have a look: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol40/0996/2026/en/ Although when I skimmed it, it felt a little one-sided to me. A little overly focused on "average home user and impact on them" and less so other impacts.
For example, I found little on the wider impacts on art and personal expression in a society, like explored here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/20/ai-art-concerns-originality-connection
Although I suppose perhaps that angle isn't concrete enough for human rights violations, I don't know. Or perhaps I just missed it. It's a fairly long report.
one legitimate reason to crose an issue on github is that they are already working on it. they sholud probably have left a comment though.
I suppose that could be one possible explanation. Let's hope that this is why. However, the previous comments do make me worry.
Funny how the masses of exploited "human labelers" never raised any eyebrows but now that data centers are coming to their backyard everyone suddenly gives a shit.