Seeing the US public, this does't seem much like a culture war. Maybe culture consensus would be more apt. I would have a hard time finding large groups of people vehemently arguing for data centers or more AI at a town hall or something.

It feels like the data center situation has many people seeing it as a Big Business vs average people fight instead of red vs blue. Even the president's posts about it all being Chinese propaganda are falling a bit flat.

It's wild that there are people out there who hate a technology that can literally work for them.

There are already widespread attempts, by both red and blue proponents of AI, to paint opposition to AI as being from the other side. Hopefully those ad-hominem arguments will peter out as it becomes clear that opposition is bipartisan.

>though it does at least seem that the dividing lines won't be red vs blue this time.

You'd think. Every single person unreasonably skeptical of AI that I know of usually comes from blue echo chambers.

It's not a culture war. It comes down to whether you care about the environment or not.

LLMs are destroying the planet.

I think it's a very common human trope to believe that we are in end-times. I imagine the overlap between the people that believe that AI will end humanity and those that believed climate change will end humanity 10 years ago is pretty significant. Before that it was people that believed in the rapture.

Sure one of these things could technically end humanity within our lifetimes. But the fact that the end of humanity has been predicted for as long as humans have been around is telling.

what culture war? it's a class war mon ami.

i've met not a single meatspace human outside of techbros who were in favor of unlimited AI. most of the tech bros even conceeded that it could be terrible for everyone including themselves, but mostly laughed it off as #yolo or "we can't get the Chinese get ahead".

not one of those in favor of AI was making less than 200k a year.

they're already low-key priming people with Zechariah 13:8 -- "two-thirds will be cut off and perish"? -- on places like 8chan, or via "edgy" tuber channels like ssethtzeehtach, and it's not hard to see the writing on the wall if you're an average joe.

The Department of War is posting memes against Effective Altruism on Twitter and Bernie Sanders is putting out video of him talking to Elizier Yudkowsky.

It is already a political culture war topic.

The job annihilation machine? Becoming a culture war thing? How dare these peasants want jobs? Let them vibe slop!

Vaccines and 5G (remember European kooks burning down cell towers?) became political culture wars, so this is unlikely to be any different.

The dividing lines always end up red or blue, there must be some kind of "social physics" law which states that these work as two attractors. Will the left or the right will end up rabidly pro-AI/anti-AI? Place your bets! Because you know it will happen.

These things you list and more have a lot of power even if there's a slight chance of them being true. The average person doesn't see any benefit to a data center near them, so they're unwilling to even risk a single drawback. The best case as they see it is that a new data center will result in no net gain for themselves.

Is it surprising that people who get most of their information from algorithms tailored by the industry they are protesting are ill-informed about the actual problems those companies are creating?

People can feel the misalignment, but they don't understand it. That's the future we are accelerating towards

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This concern carries within it the assumption that having LLMs gives the parties as much influence as what nuclear weapons do in warfare. An assumption that should probably be checked.

Then maybe the EU and Canada should start innovating, so they can have a seat at the table rather than just wringing their hands about it.

Why should they give a shit what some foreign despots agree to?

Just because there are fantastical elements to these stories doesn't mean their themes can't be poignant examinations of where the real world is headed.

We're not in a giant simulation, but technology is causing people to lose contact with reality, and our lives increasingly become about keeping a giant "machine" running.

We may not have a SkyNet in charge of our nuclear missiles, but should we not be concerned about AI making life-and-death decisions in war?

Or they are promoting a language where the lower viscera speak to lower viscera. A zombie-like contagion in which the spreading is through suggestive imagery.

Pornographic enrollment: images towards lower excitement, to enlarge the number of the lowerly excited.

Are you familiar with the concept of rhetoric? This is something similar.

Our machines are now more intelligent than most humans, which would have qualified as "fantasy" as recently as 3 years ago. Clearly some people will only give up on this flawed reasoning exactly when the robot boot is pressed against their throat lmao.

AI affects the poor the most. It can have consequences with regards to military, privacy, security and finances of everyday people.

Don't be so snarky, right now its actually true because they pump drinking water directly from the grounds and evaporating them into the air and therefore taking local water and putting it in some ciruclation which will not refill the local water...

> a single fully processed wafer can ultimately consume anywhere from 3,100 to nearly 5,000 liters of water by the time it is finished.

source: AI

Where did you see this? The only claim I saw from the article was that 1 prompt uses 16oz of water, which is obviously false if you do any level of research

So what's the solution? Another rent-seeking system where any future information an AI learns about the world has to be carefully attributed for the possibility that someone might take a piece. A whole patent-troll/music industry style mass buy up of AI information rights with a team of lawyers sending out DMCA warnings hooked into every harness.

Does it get paid out on training or is it like music where if the model output is vaguely similar to something someone else created they get a royalty.

> They argue that LLMs are stealing our culture to feed it back to us.

How is that any different from what media already did.

Most of Disney's original material was European cultural stories.

The AI protestors in the article are holding up signs that say AI will kill us all.

They think this is a doomsday technology. They’re not in the streets over a concern about cultural appropriation in LLM training sets.

I mean, the CEO of Microsoft would agree with them:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s...

I find their arguments are less naive than the ones who used to say 5G controls our brains just few years ago. I remember personally back in 2021 when we used 5g to fly drones, very educated individuals claimed they don’t feel ok and are sick because they stood next to the tower for few hours because they heard 5g is bad!! just a normal 5g, not even mmwave or anything similar.

AI can be useful no doubt, I think most of people who are against AI aren’t against the concept itself, they are against the business built around it, the greed that will use AI to destroy the quality of life, the mass surveillance that won’t be possible without AI, destroying rare books for AI training, slopification of everything you see around from texts to images to videos, among other legitimate reasons to hate it. Open ai used to be a non for profit, I don’t think anyone protesting AI now would have issues with the company few years ago, when the main focus was research, solve issues, cure diseases, among many other good reasons.

I've really been liking the car analogies for AI lately.

Personally i dislike driving, i dont like cars or trucks or traffic, yet i own a car. I can protest cars and they wont go away. We could shutdown the 2 biggest automobile makers and it likely just messes with prices/availability for the general public, but doesnt put the genie back in the bottle, hell we can shut down all car manufacturing and it is the same lack of shutting down driving, it just creates a lack of surplus supply.

All these things are pretty true about AI as well, nothing puts the genie back in the bottle.

What we can do, is try to strive towards electric cars, stop putting lead in fuel, enforce laws so driving becomes safer etc. Same with AI, strive towards greener electricity, find some sort of solution to deal with the absurd noise problem that is pervasive across every single area any generated content touches. Build some structure so intelligence is accessible to the average person rather than only the privileged/governments.

One of the worst things about AI, i think is the timing of it. We have built our modern internet experience into auto suggestions, and have no way to filter out what is and isn't a real person's content, or even higher effort content, and all those suggestions have perverse incentives to GET suggested in the form of ads/clout/whatever. Pair that with the absurd noise problem generated content produces everywhere.

They haven't figured out what to do about climate change yet though. Why do you assume it is ok to power on and someone else will fix tye problems for us?

No pressure would make it even worse.

But lets be honest, we were put into specific spots, we can't just get out.

We were able to just take land and make it ours, if you get put on a planet were everything is owned, the critisism were your food and cloth is coming is not their fault.

Its not pointless. It might have less impact than it should, but its not pointless.