This latest round of projects are often located within or next to communities too, where most pre-AI projects were more out of the way, increasing immediately visible impact dramatically via noise and air and water pollution.

I've been flagging nearly every HN post that has anything to do with AI, even negative. The quicker we get "AI" out of our zeitgeist, the better. AI isn't even a solid term, the term "artificial intelligence" is almost 100 years old at this point, and the definition has changed so many times that it's a useless term.

ELIZA was "AI". But it didn't have the same level of societal damage. HAL 9000 was "AI". Games have "AI" for decades. But "AI" today has been coopted by corporations who seek to lock people into their AIaaS. Local LLMs exist, and I have a few models on my computer for fun. Those models still probably used more power than I would like to be generated. But I will never, ever, ever use cloud AI to even so much as ask a question. If there is a long-term future in AI, it's in local models