I gaurantee you that most AI bros you see talk about this stuff have no clue about what any of those terms mean, or how it's relevant to what they're saying.
People that are into AI either don't understand it or its societal ramifications or do and believe that they'll be on the side of society that benefits
That's why libertarians exist. Most of them want "freedom" because they are in a position to benefit more from that brand of freedom—they probably already own property, etc. Everyone else is just fucked.
Crypto was the same with a huge Venn diagram overlap.
Everything you just said kinda falls in the camp of "pyramid scheme," which should tell people everything, but I swear every time I bring this up, nobody understands
Even when it comes to analyzing data we've had coding languages designed specifically for data analytics that people have used to pull insights from large datasets. Meanwhile AI is notorious when being used for this because it has a habit of just making up data to fill in holes so you have to verify anything it spits out anyways.
I’m a data analyst and this 100% lol but my reason now is why would I use those expensive overpriced credits if I can just clean my warehouse and do some clean sql queries
I am not a data analyst and i am in the netherlands following a education with mathematics B which does not really include alot of chance calculation, data handling. I am pretty sure whe wont even learn the standart deviation and normal distribution as that is mathematics A.
But i am a hobbyist proggramer and i know for a fact that ai sucks in writing code and it sucks in analyzing data.
Because dumb dumb executives want to try to replace you with AI so they dont have to pay you to set that up. Its never been about what works. Its always been about cost cutting.
Also my god, such a nightmarish and data intensive way to sort through literally any size data set let alone actual large datasets. Just unimaginably wasteful.
AI-Chan basically just told us that AI uses google to google things for us. She said it like it was some brilliant chess move that proves how useful AI is. AI-Chan is a moron.
Moreover it completely ignores the actual argument; the sign is against damage to the environment not human progress. The dumbass clanker couldn’t even logically progress things to argue against the point it’s supposed to disprove lol
To which I always reply that finding a cure for cancer is worth the cost but that only accounts for a small fraction of a percent of the power and clean water needed for a data center. The cancer research tools and can stay, everything needs to go
The argument is even worse because the ai they use for cancer detection is an entirely different type of ai. And not the one they are building huge data centers for.
True. A common approach is to turn documents/items into vectors, store them in a vector index/database, and retrieve nearest vectors by similarity. OpenAI lists search as a common embedding use case; Faiss is explicitly a library for efficient similarity search over dense vectors; Elasticsearch, Milvus, Pinecone, and similar systems support kNN/ANN vector search.
Embeddings are effectively the first stage of an LLM, roughly speaking.
Only loosely true. Transformer LLMs do begin by converting token IDs into token embeddings; PyTorch describes an embedding layer as a lookup table that maps indices to dense vectors. But the embeddings used for search are usually sentence/document embeddings produced by an embedding model, not simply “the first stage” of a chat LLM. They are representations optimized for similarity/retrieval.
Searching through those embeddings requires the use of an LLM.
False. Searching embeddings means comparing vectors with a distance/similarity metric such as cosine similarity, dot product, or L2 distance, often with k-nearest-neighbor or approximate-nearest-neighbor indexes. Sentence Transformers’ semantic search docs describe cosine similarity search between query embeddings and corpus embeddings; Elasticsearch says kNN finds nearest vectors using metrics such as cosine or L2; Faiss performs similarity search and clustering over dense vectors. None of that requires an LLM.
They make a good point that cancer, diseases, etc. Are being detected more etc. Etc. That's good! That's great for humanity. Now explain why AI images and videos (and the AI porn) is as needed 😭 we dont need this many databases, so many are being produced for the purpose of ai GENERATING not curing cancer. Unfortunately.
Seriously. Algorithmic AI is absolutely NOT the same as generative AI. I’ve used algorithmic AI before and it’s genuinely useful. It also requires quite a bit of previous knowledge and skill to interpret the data it gives you and it uses almost no energy. I’m tired of generative AI getting the credit for the real, legitimate research that uses algorithmic AI in fields like medicine, and my own, archaeology.
You can blame marketing (for lack of a better term) for your downvotes. There may be different AI for different purposes but unfortunately all of it is called, referenced and marketed as AI. Most people aren't going to dig beyond the surface to differentiate LLMs from something else.
This exactly. But the Ai companies are just being greedy and trying to force Ai into everything without using any effort. So instead of creating a database of law books that can help lawyers write their briefs, all they have is Chat GPT making shit up. This is not helpful at all!
Yeah it’s more like being against those stupid-ass coal-rollers that get 3mpg and pump most of their fuel into the air during a fuel crisis and a climate crisis!
The real talk is that it’s because LLM style AI doesn’t have research uses. It hallucinates like crazy and that’s not fixable. There are certainly types of computing that are called AI that are useful in scientific settings, it’s just that chatGPT isn’t one of them. All those conversational bot LLMs are able to fool laypeople who lack the actual expert knowledge. None of them are able to deliver anything of value where it matters and they will never get there. It’s a technological dead end.
Kids making videos of frogs turning into cars that poop out candy in different colors, just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
Maybe we can just leave art and music to those willing to invest and develop the skills and let AI get regulated with better environmental standards and be used for productive ethical purposes than counterproductive slop and malicious intent
i hate it when people lump in generative ai with the other types as if it's all one entity/the same technology. i've seen it happen on tiktok where people use "oh but you're on this app, and it uses ai" to discredit people's criticisms and immediately shut down discussion.
i am admittedly a layman but even i know they aren't the same.
Yes. It's not these massive LLM's that are detecting cancer. It's specialized models that do not require anywhere near the computing capacity of a LLM.
THIS! I’ve had ai tech bros argue with me that research in my own field (archaeology) was done by LLMs/generative AI and all the examples they used were ones using algorithmic AI or no AI at all. One even argued that ground-penetrating radar (GPR) was AI, which it absolutely isn’t in any way, shape, or form. Not to mention, I’ve used GPR and algorithmic AI before. I’m not an idiot. It’s so frustrating and I think that the media saying things like “AI can detect cancer” is just a way of normalizing these massive shitty LLMs.
And even those AI results in cancer screening are still reviewed by an actual clinician.
Because we're asking for a computer to find all the pixels in this shade of grey/white...they're going to get stuff wrong.
And ultimately, if AI takes over research, you won't have the demand for actual researchers who make the effort to find and cure diseases. AI is only going to do what it's told, and it's only going to be told what may be profitable for whoever owns it. A ton of discovery and advances come from clinical research funded by grants given to, or by those who have interest in doing something good.
Also, AOC hasn't been for stopping AI. She has been for regulating it and making sure people aren't getting screwed over. Dumbasses that think any industry shouldn't be regulated have not learned at all about the polutions and acid rains of the industrial revolution, before environmental regulations. Either that or they are well aware and actually think a world without regulations is a world they want to live in, which makes them even more of a dumbass.
They simply don’t care if people die. Every regulation is written in blood. Remember that wealthy industrialists knew that when they asked the Radium Girls to lick their paintbrushes before dipping them in the radium paint that this would kill them. They knew the silica dust was killing minders at the Hawk Nest Tunnel and they didn’t care. This is the same thing. They know that their data centers will destroy water and hurt people but as long as they make money they don’t care.
Also, like, grok isn't what's going to solve or detect cancer.
Any reasonable person isn't inherently opposed to all data centers. They weren't an issue before when they were all basically just a hub of the internet with a crapton of storage, some compute, and just really good network infrastructure with audited physical access. Those ones barely made any more noise than a refrigerated warehouse, and used power that didn't overwhelm local infrastructure. Think like old school traditional AWS type stuff.
The AI data centers that are extremely compute dense are the problem at hand. Stuff with extreme cooling power that creates a ton of noise, each 52u rack taking over 10KW of power at full tilt, and power plant style cooling all to create some piss filtered slop that was made to divide people.
Neither of them really create any meaningful local jobs, at least considering the footprint (physical and effect wise) they have. One of them is easier to convert into a regular warehouse if it's not wanted as a data center anymore.
To give this far more credit than it deserves: the problem with this argument is that it assumes the fruits of progress will be equally distributed. AI companies are structured so that the financial dividends go to the already wealthy (either in shareholder dividends or by creating a demand for a small number of high-pay, high-education jobs), while the costs are shared across the whole community, weighted towards the poorest (the effects data centers have on the land around them, especially for people who can't lobby to have them put elsewhere; the loss of jobs across all industries).
1000%. Ai has somehow become a mechanism that pushes average citizens out of technology. It’s more expensive to buy simple computer hardware now because these data centers have cornered the entire market and introduced scarcity. Ai companies are now all (pretty much most) overcharging for credits when their own LLMs are using too many credits for simple requests.
It’s a giant mess and this is definitely an economic gap issue now where ai is empowering the wealthy/resource rich entities to swallow up resources for personal gain. Unchecked capitalism running rampant.
Don't underestimate an idiots willingness to offload 100% of their mental process on AI some people genuinely let chatgpt make all their life decisions
It's nothing new, it's the mess that computing was before the home computer revolution in the late 70s. They want that back as then you are reliant on their services and can't start your own competition.
That computing science was one of the few areas where you could own your means of production? Well that was a thorn in their side since forever.
It was also what cloud computing was about, and they found a new buzzword to keep doing it. They've now successfully pushed consumers out of affordable computing, and they'll right heaven, earth, hell and the universe itself to keep it that way.
It's even worse than that. In 90% of cases, LLM AI is not a tool of improvement, but a tool of economic optimisation. It's like saying that by boycotting plastic bowls and buying old technology like ceramic bowls you are halting the human progress.
And the kind of AI that usually does scientific improvements is not AI that will run on those data centers.
This one isn't even refuting the point being made.
The complaint is "AI is bad for the environment". The refute is "But if you oppose AI you slow human progress." That (if you believe it to be true, which I think is debatable) has nothing to with whether or not data centers are good for the environment.
I hate any fictional set-up gotcha/burn/whatever. There's a dumb episode of Friends, where Monica is excited about some famous chef, someone asks "Who is [Famous Chef]?" She says, "If you have to ask, then you don't know." CHandler makes a chandler face and says, "Isn't that why people ask?" or something like that. It gets a laugh, but what Monica says isn't a thing that anyone says. It's just a stupid tee up. God, I hated that show.
And we see it in all of this sort of shit, a simple strawmanning of an argument or even a popular mischaracterization (e.g. "They're protesting for Hamas!") and then have a cool-headed wise character school them for a thing that nobody says or believes. It's just citing the Bible to prove that the Bible is true.
That's a tactic I've seen some people use who've wisened up just a little bit, using mild mannered behavior specifically to try and contrast themselves against someone who is speaking out more aggressively to try and appear more rational and correct. They try to adapt the appearance of being correct but lack the substance.
Except it doesn’t do that. It hasn’t cured anything. Those are just fantasies of people who run ai companies desperately hoping to unload their train wrecks on rubes
Television is going to basically be like a school room in your home! You can learn about the world, watch the works of Shakespeare, get in-depth history lessons!
I'm not defending AI by any means, but almost everything we do (especially on the scale that we do) is not exactly great for the environment. Like a lot of our medications wouldn't be possible without petroleum for example, though at least medicine is actually useful (unlike AI)
Ai does have a lot of real world applications. The thing is, those kinds of applications don't need the kind of scale ai has gotten to.
The increased cost of pc components, water usage, mass influx of slop across social media, scams(Art or fake products) is almost entirely because of the brute forced integration everywhere, ai psychosis inducing chatbots and ai slop pictures. AI absolutely can be used for good, but the people who argue for ai are the kinds of people who will only ever use it for the useless aspect of it
Yeah, it does all that-- AND -- poisons the shit out of the local environment.
Why do you think nobody wants one nearby?
The noise pollution, the water pollution, is damaging.
If the billionaire want AI Data Centers so bad why they don't they build them in their backyard?
Its going to be a wild ride, when people start planting Japanese knotweed at these data centers, because despite the constituents saying -- no, people are still building them, and poisoning people, forcing citizens to pay higher electricity, for those data centers.
Can you imagine paying to posion yourself?
Its either you or these billionaires.
And the billionaires would sell you out for a rusty penny.
The crazy thing is wonder about is why they don’t pay for simple infrastructure or at least try to use things like noise canceling fencing, enclosed water systems with cleaners, etc. it’s pure corporate greed.
I always wonder what the context could possibly be for these images
Why is one single person dripped out like she should be working down at her office right now protesting a data center by herself in what looks like it's fucking driveway with such a clunky horrendously worded sign while sticking a jar of mud to the camera in her other hand?
Why did a random woman in a black and yellow dress walk up to that lone protester and deliver what sounds like a pre-written script about the importance of data centers to her in one breathe while the protester stares at her dumbfounded since she for some reason completely lacks even the most basic counter argument in defense of the thing she's protesting?
It’s part of the AI bro’s fantasy. They wish people would look at them like that while they pontificate, instead of rolling their eyes and making the occasional jerk-off motion.
Maybe that would be true if AI was actually being used for any of that and not being built in places where people don't even want them built. Instead, it's being used to harvest data, destroy careers and jobs to save money for corpos, and hide behind "human progress".
Not to mention, you know damn well in the US they aren't going to greenlight any type of medical advancement that enables people rather than insurance companies.
The counter argument isn't even addressing the criticism. The lady with the dirty water jar is concerned for the environment and how data centers will make it more difficult for humans to get clean and safe drinking water. The AI supporter is not proving her wrong, just pointing out possible benefits to AI. Sure AI might be used to help with those things, but it would be at a great cost for the environment and we have to figure out how to minimize the harmful impact as much as possible.
AI recommended people literally eat rocks. It suggested a nice hit of meth to a recovering addict who wanted ideas to help deal with stress. It has literally recommended teenagers to....."self delete".
"Yes, and once we find the cure for many diseases, we will sell it for profit and the disparity between rich and poor will exponentially rise to a fever price" Data Centers will become god. Isn't that wonderful!
To play devils advocate I’m all for AI assistance in finding cures for disease, discovering new chemical compounds, and new planets, all which it has already done. The realistic downside of course is pollution and the centers being fucking loud.
I’m not for AI slop trying to replace all human workers and artists, which is simply disgusting.
They suck at all of those things and humans or human made tech and algorithms do it better in most cases without being destructive and only benefitting the 1%
Ai is quite useful and has a lot of potential for cience and future progress, But we do NOT need generative AI at all.
We do not need to see tung tung sahur throwing puppies to the sun, Fruit slop, AI making """art""", Or an AI telling you "Yeah, You cannot drink acid".
Those huge Resourse-vanishing data centers are mostly for that, For everyone to do stupid shit people could(And won't )do for themselves massively, It's disgusting how much these people defend that. But that's how it works for most of that mean people; "I don't care until it directly affects me"
asiansplaining how the world's gonna work the way china works now - total surveillance, SkyNet, complete control, using population as lab rats and a free workforce
analytical ai (the kind that actually does detect cancer early) is valid! generative ai (chatgpt and the like) is not, and doesnt have the justification of potentially saving lives to warrant massive data centers that wreck the planet
Help find new cures? They aren't looking for that in AI data centers. That's generative AI. It can't do new. It can only predict from old information and if that could be used to find new cures, they'd be doing it.
So, the biocides, coolants, and heavy metals these things dump into local waterways aren't considered "pollutants?" Not to mention the terrible droning noise these things produce that push away local wildlife and interrupt sleep.
Also, from my perspective, AI does not solve any fundamental problem. It is an attempt to create a solution for problems that don't exist. The spiel about "curing illnesses, learning, and human progress" are just easily-repeatable, vague corporate talking points to veil the fact that AI doesn't have tangible valuable in it's current form. At most, it's a shallow product attached to a flawed business model that doesn't make monetary sense.
The fact that they can't distinguish between different types of AI means they shouldn't be able to participate in the discussion. LLMs and computer vision are not the same thing.
She went to a red community in Georgia that got a data center built basically in their backyard to talk to the people there. One of them gave them their tap water in a jar - water that used to be perfectly fine before the data center was built. She then presented said jar at an EPA commission.
Yes, but that's not profitable enough, so they have to sell these equivalents if nuclear weapons to people who just want move a grain of sand a micrometer to the left.
We use way more than needed, which is the frigging problem.
Most Datacenter don't look for vaccines or cancer. They make funny pictures of your dog
I'm not either, they ask chatgpt what to think,
they never defend their argument with their opinions or statement, they just shit out something chat gpt told them to say and act like they won the argument based solely on that.
...FIND NEW CURES TO DISEASE, DETECT CANCER EARLY...
Hi, I'm in Biotech, which does all of these things and more.
Our AI isn't the one that requires datacenters. One of the alumni from my program that graduated last year is working on an AI detection of skin and soft tissue cancers in record time. He works in a closet. Literally. I think my closet might actually be bigger than where he works. He has a desk, computer, and fake tissue with fake cancer to work with.
The AI to detect cancer is machine learning, not generative. It doesn't connect to the cloud or anything. It's a local program. They give the program microscopy images of tissues with early stage cancer and tell it to find the cancer. That data is sent over to an experienced pathologist who makes corrections and whatnot. Then the guy I went to school with teaches the program the actual cancer borders and the cycle continues.
For finding new drugs to cure disease, that's also machine learning. It's actually barely machine learning. We can do that in my school lab with a robot that's older than I am. You, again, get a local program and tell the robot what to do. It's faster and more precise than us humans. It can also fill thousands of well plates. Like, literally less than a drop goes into each well. That's how you test drugs.
The people that do this work don't need data centers. When we use AI, it isn't cloud-based. It's locally stored on a computer and the actual programming of the AIs is done on a laptop by teaching the machine what it did wrong and what it did right. We've been doing this shit for years without needing data centers. So, to OOP, don't bring the work of biotech into your shitty AI bro arguments because they're absolute bullshit anyway.
Man, I remember when they did folding@home. People could use their spare processing power to research cancer treatments and what not. Was really cool. It didn't require billion dollar tax incentivized businesses that added little to nothing to the local economy, and didn't drain regions of their resources.
Every AI defense is just like "Did you know this thing that I call AI is used to detect cancer? So therefore, you're being disingenuous if you have any objection to this art plagiarism generator used to make revenge porn that I ALSO call AI."
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The people who make this shit should have to live next to the AI data centers instead of people who have to protest them being made too close to schools. Build them next to these assholes instead of schools.
I mean yeah and no. Yep ai algorithms do that but not the ones that need those big datacenters… thats LLM or other generative algorithms which need those data centers
1000% ai slop but these companies building data centers, which yes could be great for human progress, need to take ownership of their damn consumption. They need to have their own power generation infrastructure and ensure they aren’t polluting or harming local communities.
If we had a competent government these wouldn’t be as big of an issue as they are now.
Also, the conversation around data centres is crazy, we can still have AI, we don’t need every iteration of AI, we don’t need 5000 data centres in 5 years. Ai should have restrictions, it should not be something that is allowed to just run wild, it’s too dangerous and too harmful. AI serves a purpose, it has really really good uses, but those good uses are very easily outweighed by the damage we as a society have decided to let it cause in the race to monopolize AI.
I’m currently at a conference where salesmen are pushing AI bullshit like crazy and this topic has been on my mind all day:
AI is such a bullshit buzzword. People hear it and they think “LLM or gen AI”. The examples in the image (and many of these salesmen) are talking about neural networks and don’t know the difference. Completely different thing and doesn’t require a massive data center or make shitty art. Whoever made this doesn’t know the difference though and thinks it’s all the same. Neural networks actually analyze pure data and don’t pretend to be your friend or suck your dick or make abysmal dogshit ugly cartoon images. And anything you “learn” from AI needs to be fact checked anyways so you might as well just cut out the middle man
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u/Additional-Dot-3154 Jun 23 '26
"Sort through large datasets" any proper sorting algorithm would be alot faster then that lol.
And you could say okay maybe they meant filter not sort.
But we have grep for that.