I understand that folks here think that the general anti-AI sentiments that can be found in some of US culture are often misguided.

It's likely projection on my part but I have a deep suspicion that people understand that mass surveillance by the state is the main use case for all these LLMs, camera systems, and increasing large data centers.

That certainly is my own worry, at least.

>mass surveillance

Its not mass surveillance by the state, exclusively.

Its also the potential for mis-use and corruption by criminal networks.

Plus, there's that whole degradation of culture factor. Sure, you trust your government today. But do you trust the government of tomorrow?

Anyone who thinks this is misguided is probably seeking to profit from it at some point.

And that is precisely the problem.

Think about it the way the US thought about them pesky Rooskies during the Cold War:

Don't look at intentions. Look at capabilities.

There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism, when in reality we'll likely all end up renting everything we own from the 6 people who own all the companies in the world. There seems to be a motte and bailey where the motte is "oh we should just remove all the governmental controls and let private enterprise flourish!" and then the bailey is "don't you see how little freedom you have from government" when it's made apparent what private enterprise has done in the modern world.

Mass surveillance? You could be right.

Government? As others have said, government may well contract it out to private companies. But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better.

People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.

Remember Cambridge Analytica and PRISM?

I don't think it's unrealistic for state or another party to be taking the decades of data on individuals they have and feeding it into their large hyperscale data centers and using the platforms they own to predict our actions and propagandize us.

Unfortunately, I don't think most people understand it's about mass surveillance yet, but about the misappropriation of resources in lower income communities to power LLMs and/or the intellectual theft and profits off the data used to train LLMs.

The problem is, people who are the most spoken about personal freedom are the ones also voting conservative all the time. The libertarian square is still on the right.

By the time the government overreach starts being used on them, its gonna be too late.

Age old story in human history.

> are often misguided

Dude, they're literally watching Flock Cameras go up in their neighborhood, being told they use AI, and anyone with a brain who can add 2+2 (or read Larry Ellison on "best behavior") concludes these data centers are not merely for ChatGPT.

In which case, they see noise pollution, water pollution, construction pollution, property value damage, utility bill cost explosions; and what's the reward? Surveillance and white-collar job loss, possibly culminating in home loss. With the added irony of corporations saying data centers will create jobs, simultaneously as they run record-breaking layoffs and increase outsourcing. "Misguided."

It's projection on your part. The general public (excluding the "very online" subset thereof) is barely even aware of mass surveillance.