Most Americans Say AI Is Bad for Society, Oppose More Data Centers
abcnews.com
abcnews.com
By the way, your municipality may have drawn interest by excusing the builder/owner from most property taxes, too, so it won't support your schools and essential services.
The utility monopolies are partly/mostly to blame for this. Their rates have become so disconnected from reality that it's cheaper to install your own power generation. They've all been posting record profits, up 50% where I am, in the last 5 years, as rates continue to increase.
I'm sure the utility companies are ecstatic how the blame as been put squarely on data centers.
But yes, they say it's green energy requirements/expansion. But, they're also very good at making excuses, including when they're old equipment erases whole towns due to fires they started, from leaving it all unmaintained to help with those record profits.
All I'm getting from your comment is maybe the government should provide public options for payment processors, gig workers, social media, email, and operating systems.
Maybe they should start by nationalizing a few of these companies and provide the benefits to the public instead of the billionaires.
No, I'm saying that most people are enjoying the benefits of data centers, without knowing they're contributing to the problem, including hyper scalars, which aren't running idle. The average person is using them indirectly (via media, software, services the use, generated by AI) and directly (go talk to a teen to understand the scale of AI use).
This is the same argument for people being upset that China pollutes so much as they sit on their furniture made with petroleum based plastics, from China, wearing shoes manufactured in China, while typing the message on an iPhone made in China.
Since the awareness is so low, I think a useful question to include in the poll would have been "Do you use AI or data centers?"
And, I don't see how this is related to oligarchs. Without the data centers, all the services would be more expensive. They're a very simple concept: bulk purchased compute components with cheap industrial electric rates.
and maybe what I’m taking away from your post is too many god damned things rely on a datacenter.
The trumpworld corruption and cult behavior and elevation of absolute nincompoops notwithstanding. Data center hatred could be what helps heal America after that amazing little blood clot grows up.
If they are structured to end up running at a loss and generate almost zero tax revenue (i.e. just payroll tax on a dozen full time staff) on large amounts of revenue, is that good for the people of the city/state/country?
actually use a search engine again
Reminds me of the quote:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."In the same sense that a wounded man cornered by lions might "reveal his preference" to jump off the cliff or be eaten alive.
Beware the pundit who extrapolates from that while blithely ignoring the true preference of "not dying".
> AI is the most rapidly adopted service in human history.
Do you have any sources for this or how this was calculated?
I'm still skeptical that the source of Western dissent is misinformation campaigns run by said Asiatic bloc, though.
You may find some of the work done by Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda Project to be interesting.
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/reports/challenging-tru...
If I was Chinese I'd probably have more faith that AI advances are going to benefit society as a whole than just a few tech billionaires.
As an American, not so much.
American CEOs are almost comic book levels of evil.
When someone favors what they saw on YouTube over multiple research studies or industry reports or even government reports, I think it’s fair to say they lack intellectual curiosity and are not serious enough to discuss or debate in good faith.
There’s a difference between fact and opinion and there are a lot of confidently incorrect people.
First, people seek authenticity. In written content, people want to know there is a real human author thinking about every word, and in photos, people do not want to be deceived by deepfakes. It's much harder to tell in a world of AI slop, hence the rise of apps like Pangram. This is a significant negative externality.
Second, people who invest their time learning creative fields seek recognition for all the hard work they have put in. Now their skills are devalued, again because of slop. This is another negative externality.
Having more pictures and videos is nice in some ways but your head is in the sand if you think it's all roses.
Even if we're talking about creative arts, if people cannot tell the difference between AI-generated content and human-generated content, then how are they being harmed by the AI-generated creative content?
Assuming they value them equally and they prefer to have more content, AI is strictly a positive for people.
"Strictly a positive" is also a strange choice of words when the technology is ripping out the livelihoods of so many creators. I would accept "it has tradeoffs, but is a net positive over the long run". But the former is objectively false.
Automation will of course harm whichever sector of the economy remains on the manual processes, but it leads to more abundance overall.
Even the people who lose jobs due to automation are better off overall. If you personally consume goods and services produced by 100 different classes of professionals, and you yourself work in one of those 100 classes of professional work, and your job gets automated, you lose out in that narrow sense, but you gain from having the products and services produced by the other 99 classes of professionals, become more abundant through automation.
With respect to authenticity, that's easy to prove. Take coffee for example. People are willing to pay more for coffee that was made by hand. So what do companies do? They simply have the baristas make the coffee in front of the customers. Market incentives will produce efficient ways of proving authenticity.
> It's not self-evident that pointing out hypocrisy isn't a valid refutation
If I say drinking tons of sugary soda every day is bad for you, when I drink nothing but myself, how would my hypocrisy have a bearing on the effects of drinking soda? Yes, it's self-evident. It shouldn't even need saying because nobody should be so dishonest to even attempt it as an argument. It's the kind of dumb shit people say about other people, never to them.
What kind of ai content do you think people are watching?
> What kind of ai content do you think people are watching?
I can't think of a platform that isn't showering users with AI content no matter how much content blocking and history-disabling one does. It's at least half of everything that gets injected into feeds, especially on platforms like Instagram, and while there are many people who can recognize AI slop, enough of them continue engaging with it that it's clearly being incentivized. There are plenty of otherwise smart people I know who can't distinguish all of it from reality. Older people are especially susceptible. If you know any baby boomers who regularly use Facebook, they're almost certainly falling for AI slop all the time even if they think they're savvy enough to recognize all of it.
Don't take this the wrong way, but your phrasing of that question makes me wonder whether we're talking about two different things or if your experience with people's habits happens to be radically different from what I've seen as normative. I guess it's possible you wouldn't know what kind of AI content people tend to be watching if you've managed to distance yourself from it that much.
To answer your question now that I've rambled, tons of things are AI generated. Animal videos, dancing videos, tutorials, news, podcasts, music, etc.
Could I be wrong? Yeah, sure. My experience tells me the following:
- The vast majority of people claim to hate AI slop.
- Most people think they can reliably recognize AI slop.
- Almost everyone is getting fooled by AI in some form form at some frequency.
- AI slop almost can't be avoided without only following certain creators or content discovery, and even then it's not completely avoidable.
- I've been duped by AI slop occasionally, and I'm the guy who used to have to inform people all the time that viral videos were faking things with CGI (my family has a history in the entertainment business).
- At least half of people are more upset by the fact someone is breaking their belief in content being real than by the fact that the content intentionally fooled them.
- Most people aren't significantly changing their media consumption habits in response to AI slop.
That's why I am not particularly interested in what the average American thinks about AI. It's about as insightful as asking a woman about dating advice for men. If people overwhelmingly think AI is bad for society, then the answer would be for them to stop consuming it, yet they still do, and there's really no excuse for them to do so if they really think it's that bad.
I encourage you to read "About the Study".
"Ipsos conducted sampling, interviewing and tabulation for the survey using the KnowledgePanel, a nationwide survey panel designed to be representative of the U.S. adult population. KnowledgePanel members are recruited through probability sampling methods using address-based sampling. Panel members who do not have internet access are provided with a tablet and internet service. KnowledgePanel members receive a per survey incentive, usually the equivalent of $1 (though for some it is $2) in points that can be redeemed for cash or prizes."
Yeah, the people who disagree with you are never worth listening to. (/s)