My read is

People complain about AI in public, use it heavily in private, complain about datacenters in public, slam their fists about usage limits in private.

In short, typical human behavior, want to have their cake and eat it too.

It’s like using social media to spread your message about how social media is bad and addictive.

You don’t really have another option unless you want to ostracize yourself from the society you’re trying to change.

Are most people really using it a lot in private? As someone not working in programming, neither I nor 95% of my friends and family purposefully use AI for anything. And the few that do use it mostly use it as a wikipedia replacement.

Like if I needed some throw away generic art I might use it, so maybe a few times a year. And some searches will give me ai results to read before I can scroll to click wikipedia. But if that cost me anything, required a free login, or even had to scroll past a wiki or research link, I would just keep going to wikipedia.

Specific jobs benefit a lot from AI, but the general population? I still find it questionable if people will benefit or even want to use ai commonly.

I'd rather the AI providers bear the cost of the externalities they inflict on the world.

If the cost to users is reasonable with that added burden I'll happily pay it. If it is not viable without passing costs on society, then they should not be in business.

This is such a bizarre image to conjure. It's so extremely self-satisfying for your position - why even go this far?

"Heavily"? "Complain"? "Slam their fists"? "Want to have their cake and eat it too?"

All in the service of describing how you assume your enemies are. This is beyond the pale for HN. Really petty.