i love you guys and this community. not to be sappy but the mass promulgance of ignorance in our society has me legitimately grieving at times lately, and db0 is always a gigantic breath of fresh air that reminds me humanity is righteous at our core. not to be cringe but it’s easy to slip into doomerism and “we are just intrinsically bad,” you guys help me combat that sentiment - even in my own psyche.
Spinoza would be proud of db0.
db0 is a leftist instance. we’re all anarchists for fucks sake, very clearly. don’t be dense, seriously.
just because you are ignorant does not mean we all must be. it doesn’t make one a fascist techbro to merely enjoy computer science and fucking math. sorry. i was unaware this was an anti-intellectual, anti-rationalist society.
either way i wish you well, i’m not trying to sling shit or anything. i just genuinely think your reactionary stance on AI, as well as the general societal sentiment, is grossly ignorant to the point of abandoning reason. it is upsetting. any number of db0 members could sit here slinging rote facts at you showing they’re not just “techbros,” there is a real and objective basis for their interest in machine learning; but you probably wouldn’t even bother considering or glancing at any of it because you’ve already decided your opinion on a topic you clearly are quite uninformed on the technical details of.
it seems like everyone who is anti-AI is just deadset on MAGA-esc fucking mental gymnastics. i’m honestly not convinced a large amount of anti-AI sentiment isn’t pushed by Chinese/Russian bots trying to compensate for their absolutely massive disadvantage to the United States in the arms race currently going on over machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. the US accounts for like, anywhere from 50-70% of all global compute resources depending on who you ask. we have sources demonstrating the MAGA people and their stupidity/echo-chambering was definitively spurred by similar psychological cyber-warfare. if you can’t beat 'em, make their people immune to truth & reason.
Well, first, Deloitte says data centers as a whole only account for 2% of global energy use.
This means that while yes, artificial intelligence is hogging an increasing portion of system resources and compute globally: it is still only a very, very small fraction of the energy usage of humanity as a whole or even the tech industry alone.
According to your own source’s numbers, AI’s share of data-center electricity usage is roughly 82 terawatt (also your Wired article’s author misspells terawatt as terrawatt the entire time, maybe it is a spelling I’ve just never seen?) hours, roughly similar to the annual electricity consumption of Switzerland. Sounds bad, right?
Well, yes, but actually, no.
Global energy consumption this year is around 34,000 TWh. That means that if data centers represented 2% of global energy use, data centers this year used around ~500-700 TWh total. (34,000 * 0.02 == 680)
That means that, again, using Wired’s own value of 82 TWh, AI alone represents only around 12% of global data center energy usage. Keep in mind that is not 12% of global energy usage, it is 12% of the global 2% energy usage data centers are collectively responsible for, meaning AI is responsible for a fucking staggering ~0.24% of global energy use.
What is the other 88%, of data center energy usage, you might ask? A bunch of corpo bullshit, including, namely; infrastructure for social media, streaming, and all this other shitass tech everyone readily accepted with no qualms until the spooky “AI” boogeyman made people wake up about the wider environmental impacts of big tech.
Except, not really though. Because as we see, most people are like you, and have a weird laser-focused obsession with the energy usage of AI in particular. You are doing a disservice to environmentalism by being intentionally ignorant of the wider implications of these statistics and their context. Don’t believe every sensationalized fucking Wired article you find after doing a Google search, friend.
are you fucking dense? like i seriously cannot tell if you’re serious or shitposting, and like, i’m being fr here i’m genuinely not sure and i’m not trying to be any more of a dick than some friendly ribbing might entail. like i don’t have any ill feelings for you but this just gets super frustrating after having this conversation so many times with so many people who seem utterly set on unfounded debate over rational dialectic.
it is open to criticism. lmfao. all you people fucking do is criticize it, endlessly, on social media.
can you not just let us have our own tiny fucking corner of the internet and leave us alone or is it really that much of a vendetta for you?
not to reply to two of your comments, just hanging around town rn ig lmao.
but:
better stop browsing the internet period, then. the last time you watched youtube or streamed anything it consumed far more system resources and it produced far more pollution than the vast majority of machine learning is even remotely capable of. why pick on the data centers used for AI when they’re handily outnumbered by infrastructure for other equally, if not more vain corpo products?
i genuinely mean this question in good faith, but, are you and others who harp on the environment in this discourse just ignorant of how the entire modern technology sector is actually built and runs? if your answer is anything but yes, then, why is your position objectively inconsistent and arbitrary? are you just too in the shit to realize you actually hate corporations and companies, not artificial intelligence technologies?
not to speak for everyone here but the standard is that our community is very clearly marked as generally pro-AI and we get tired of seeing the same four half baked rhetorical points from people like you over and over again. frankly, if you’re upset by AI then you probably should block all of db0. we don’t want that here anyway, hence the rule. healthy discourse is fine but you’re sitting here making multiple comments about genAI in a post that has nothing to do with it. it’s a nuisance at best and inflammatory at worst. i feel for you when it comes to dealing with poorly marked or conveyed rules/enforcement. i agree the administration could make this more clear, especially for users using alternative frontends for lemmy.
sOrRy tHaT yOuR POsItIoN iS MASsiVely uNpoPulAAAaaaAarrrR???
most of us could actually not give less of a fuck, to be entirely honest with you. we’re more focused on actually contributing to things. some of us, namely, would like to focus on building and using machine learning toolchains without hearing about olympic size swimming pools or people’s unrequited opinions on “AI” every five fucking seconds. that’s because in this case, the popular opinion is the reactionary opinion. being anti-AI is a reactionary position and the popularity of it’s a reflection of the zeitgeist.
i think genAI is art, i think machine learning itself is art. the idea that the massive amounts of cognitive work accumulating over decades, that very talented engineers and researchers have poured their hearts and souls into just to be able to bring these systems into reality… the idea that is anything but a pure expression of the human condition - and hence art - is patently fucking absurd and i’m sick of seeing the anti-AI diatribe in any way, shape, or form. our admins are great. just because a position is popular doesn’t mean it isn’t fucking brain-dead stupid.
it seems like a generated image possibly which is why the subtle styling is inconsistent (not that it matters).
i don’t hate the non-shadow vs shadow effect tho… maybe just windows could be shadowed? or maybe the shadow could be like ellipses and indicate that something opens a dialog/new thing instead of a single file?
the other guy pretty clearly meant liberal in a social & political philosophy sense and not a “liberal v conservative” modern american political theater one. i won’t speak for ferrous but i would imagine that’s why you didn’t get a reply of sorts yet. it’s kind of surprising and unsettling the amount of upvotes your comments have relative to each other but then again it seems reading comprehension is a skill more and more left to a select few.
like, anyone from .ml probably means liberal in that sense but in the particular context of this comment he definitely did and i’m confused why you’re getting upvoted when your reply is nonsensical considering liberalism is not diametric to conservative ideology within most frameworks.
sorry not to be a chode but wishy washy symbols like the ambiguity of the word “liberal” in modern discourse is a large part of what has landed us here in the first place.
no, i just think i don’t like dealing with idiots like yourself who’s perogotive is to abscond anything you read that makes you feel any cognitive dissonance.
i have nothing good to say to those who can’t engage in good-faith discussion, like yourself. you’re part of the problem with the world nowadays.
um yes? because it’s the truth? do some research before posting man. even if you were alive back then that doesn’t mean you knew wtf was up everywhere in the country with every demographic.
hard agree i actually think france’s method of counting is pretty intuitive
oh no the art was made with *gasp* DIGITAL TOOLS THAT ARE NOT ALREADY TRADITIONAL.
I AM GOING TO FUCKING SEETH AT THE MOUTH
I AM GOING TO EXPLODE
EEEEEaaaAAAAAUUUUURGH
seriously lmao the “AI” hate, as someone working in this field, gets more and more annoying everyday.
half these people making plagiarism machine jokes probably can’t even tell you what chatGPT and similar models’ tech stacks LOOK like beyond “huuuurrrr it’s an -L. -L. -M. riiight?”
not to point the finger at you specifically ekZepp, just the general zeitgeist. yes there are ethical issues with the current tools coming out. as someone who doesn’t really believe in the premise of intellectual property, the “copyright” problem is the absolute least problematic thing about these tools.
what will you do when megacorps sift through their dragon’s hoarde of data in previously impossible sums of time that then enables them to implement actual, dystopic surveillance and policy? do we just sit there and continue throwing tantrums like big babies about “ai took mah jab” and how it’s a garbage worthless excuse for technology? do people like you not realize that regardless of how much emotion juice you put towards the “vibe” of current tools being worthless hacks, that doesn’t synthesize that into reality? these tools are here, they’re real, and people better fucking grow up and learn to live with them rather than complaining endlessly about tenuous ethics issues. seriously. wise up, learn about the cutting edge and where it is today; and then learn how we can use modern innovations to stay ahead in the eternal game of proletarian cat-n-mouse.
being a stupid, stubborn, bull-headed reactionary about things gets us nowhere and i’m fucking tired of seeing this attitude ALL across the web. you people should grow up. do something instead of puking hate online to make yourself feel better.
sorry rant over thx for coming to my tedtalk
note this is good normally but terrible advice if you have ocd. idk what everyone else’s experience is like but i got so obsessive over handwashing that my skin started to slough off of my hands from how frequently i began to do it. turns out that what constitutes an activity versus a moment is really hard to tell when you’re mentally ill af. no good.
being an incel is normalized, they aren’t reprimanded for it
mfw you are the incel
go outside, touch grass.
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it’s very synchronous rather than causal. i don’t think the rhetoric and messaging of the original star wars was for you. if you’re familiar with the concepts and ideas that went into star wars in the first place then, at least imo, it’s a very natural plot turn that threepio was himself built by vader. yes, the story revolves around anakin in this grandiose and cosmic way. that’s a feature, not a bug.
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now, this’n right here kids is a prime specimen of what those highfalutin desk jockeys call a “global citizen.”
Never said there were, wasn’t a part of my original argument. I personally disagree with you and think that’s a naive take, but even if I didn’t, it doesn’t mean that there definitely aren’t such botnets active on every major social media platform; massively influencing public opinion and thus discourse on Lemmy and all other social media, even if indirectly. If you’re willing to object to the mere existence of large state-run bot farms at this point in 2025 then I have a bridge to sell you.
This is a more fair argument but I don’t think it’s particularly relevant.
Fact of the matter is that the large majority of the world’s computer and internet infrastructure is owned and maintained by American interests. If you don’t understand how that matters in this context then I think you are egregiously uninformed regarding machine learning and how this burgeoning sector of the economy actually works. Meaning, you probably shouldn’t be making such declarative statements on your opinion about it if that is the case.
China is the only other nation on Earth that might have a fighting chance against the US in an AI arms race, but, they’re still massively disadvantaged from an empirical point of view. Their only advantage over Americans is that the Chinese youth are all massively supportive of AI and AI infrastructure. China doesn’t have a large anti-AI movement due to a lot of factors but it mostly seems that in a collectivized culture there are less premonitions over things like genAI being “theft,” because ideas like the traditional Western conception of intellectual property are not common place. Whether or not this will be enough to overcome the sheer infrastructure advantage Americans have is yet to be seen. We’ll have to see how these tariffs, manufacturing, new infrastructure, and other facets of the economy actually shake out in these coming years. This stuff doesn’t exist in a vacuum, decisions made today are going to determine who “wins” tomorrow. China is certainly capable of building the infrastructure but there is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding the global economy, especially when it comes to things like fabs. Only time will tell.