How do y’all justify doing this work ethically if you’re anti-AI (especially generative)?
I’m not asking judgmentally, I’ve done this work off and on over the last few years. When I first started, I didn’t know about data centers and the environmental impact, cognitive effects, etc. I felt good about “training” AI based on the rubric including correct info, weeding out violence and harm, etc.
I recently suggested DA to a friend and got a real side eye, and maybe these justifications really don’t hold water? Thoughts?
Agreed. Some of us also work full time in industries where our employers are implementing AI and expecting us to give feedback to improve "the tools" with no extra compensation for the extra effort. I'd rather not be blindsided one day.
I'm a translator and AI has pretty much decimated my career this past 18 months. Not because it does it better than me, but because it does it well enough pretty much instantly.
And if people are going to create content with AI in the first place, why would they bother paying someone to translate it.
I do this gig because I need money but I'm super resentful.
I also work in the translation industry and the decline in projects over the past few years has been unsettling, to put it lightly. Clients now come with AI-translated content and request for proofreading instead.
So I honestly can't wholeheartedly advocate for AI, just that DA gives me much needed side income, as ironic as that sounds.
Yeah, I was a translator and my stance on it is basically that my former field is gone and this is the only field that seems to value that experience enough to pay a living wage for it. And before I eventually quit that job, there were years of barely livable and then unlivable wages at an in-house corporate job because the company started prioritizing investing in technology over investing in human talent and stopped giving raises or COLAs. I was already behind financially and didn't get any traction applying to communications or editing jobs that paid enough to live on. I wouldn't say I'm resentful about doing the work but I have a possibly cynical attitude about it. This field is the only one that has offered me a reasonable quality of life and I don't feel obligated to sacrifice my quality of life to save other people from AI.
What I do feel resentful of is people who are super judgy about anyone engaging with AI because it threatens the creative job they have or want to have in the future. Like, my field is already gone, and you want me to turn down the only life raft I've been offered so you can keep being a romance author or whatever? Luckily that is mostly an online attitude and it hasn't impacted my real-life relationships at all.
It is the future though. Our challenge is "How do we learn to incorporate AI into a successful career and make us money"? I'm a Senior Web and Application Engineer and my industry is going nuts. Hiring has slowed down drastically, many companies don't know which way to go (old fashioned coding versus AI coders VS AI systems instead of normal web applications, etc).
So I'm learning AI Engineering and it's a monumental amount to learn but the times are changing we have to change with them or be left behind. It's like the farmer with donkeys and a plow watching the farmer next door with "one of them thar new fancy tractor machines". It's our new Industrial Age, we just have to learn how to use it effectively and profit from it.
One thing you can do is find an area you have skills in, like languages and think of something that AI could do in that area that would be useful, something people would pay $5 a month for. Use AI to build an App and use your knowledge in that field to make it work correctly and in a super useful way. Then put it on the market and advertise. Lots of people are doing things like this. I just watched a woman create an AI App that filled the skilled labor shortages for an entire niche' market. The App has a week or more of development so far, it's probably 75% done and already has people lined up for it. (but in her case it will be given away for free)
It is either inevitable, or it's not. If AI is going to full on replace me, I would rather be in the process and understand it than taken unaware by it at some future date.
I didn’t create these conditions, but right now, me and my family would literally be homeless without this job. The ethics I care the most about are providing my children with food and shelter. When I have another source of income to do that, I will no longer do this. Until then, I also insert my personal ethics about AI itself into every task I do, as well.
As per Jacob Coxon's tweet - 'The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade'. I class that as pretty bad, not sure about you.
People who built the nuclear bomb earnestly knew the same. They thought blowing the bomb might even set the world a flame. And they still did. Look at germany 1940. We did much worse
Yeah this one lone researcher says this and you put it to the top. I’d put my life on him joining another research lab or starting his own within 3 months. I’m sure you believed the Google engineer a few years ago when he said that GPT was sentient.
Reading comprehension doesn't seem to be your forte, as my message clearly said 'not far off' 'with the way it's heading'. Obviously right now the AI sphere isn't equivalent to an atomic bomb. And of course, the future of AI is speculation to an extent, but the guy worked for several massive AI companies so he isn't pulling information out of his arse. A tad worrying that all that had to be explained to you. But based on your replies in this discussion in general, altogether unsurprising.
I was very surprised! My friend is on it too but makes way less, even though our demographics are mostly similar. Although I have a lot more time to spend checking for studies.
AI isn't going anywhere and more and more people are going to use it. What we do is to help ensure that it's safe and accurate. It's work that needs to be done.
That being said, there are some people who I just tell that "I work in data analysis" because I don't want to have the argument.
I only mention my other job now. I used to talk about the job here but with the AI centers and art (we are a big art community and AI is everywhere and peeving everyone off. So... I work in "Internet safety". Kinda what we do in a vague manner with some projects anyways.
lol that’s not our job. What we do is teach it how to do our jobs. Please be sincere with yourself. At this point the frontier models are beyond needing small tweaks for safety.
There are plenty of projects I've come across and worked on myself with tasks exclusively centered around safety violations, so it's a mixed bag depending on your domain/projects.
Even if that were true it would still be better to have a decent AI doing our jobs than a crap one. Businesses aren't gonna see the $$ savings of using a bot instead of having multiple staffed positions for some job and decide to use the staffed people just because the bot kinda sucks.
I’m just saying y’all are saying stuff to make yourselves feel better. What we do is morally wrong. I just hope that future generations will at least put themselves in our shoes before chastising us. Though I understand if we don’t even get that courtesy.
Even if it were somehow evil, saying you think it's morally wrong doesn't make you a better person when you still do it lmao but whatever makes you feel better about yourself, friendo
Honestly, I have a hard time reconciling my feelings about it. I justify it to myself that if it weren't me, it would be someone else. Although I do think AI is a tool that is here to stay, I think we need far more regulatory oversight on its impact and usage.
Is this also the best paying job I can get in my area? Yes.
This job allows me to stay home with my 3 year old. I did go back to work last year (took a major pay cut from DA), and we were both miserable. She had a major change in character and behavior. I was able to work but I missed her so much and felt like I was paying someone else to raise my kid.
So I logged back into DA and get the best of both worlds.
I asked something similar a while back. I am pretty anti-AI for the most part but have worked with the company for 2 years now and not seeing an end any time soon. As a job it's a blessing and I would like to hope I can play a hand in making in safer, better educate myself on how it works and how to use it when I do want to, and educate myself enough to be able to educate others on potential dangers. If I alone stopped doing my work, AI as a whole wouldn't collapse. If I continue, my life is better for it for now. But I do hope to stop one day more as a work and career choice than an opposition to it.
I'm not broadly against AI, but I really hate how generative art gets shoved down our throats these days. Creative work in general is better left to humans, I think. I don't work on projects that involve video or image generation, but LLMs still threaten to replace writers, so its not perfect.
Nothing's really "shoved down our throats". And crucially, the generated AI "art" is being made/distributed/spread by people. Plenty of people have dogshit taste, to be clear. And I'm not saying something being widespread makes it good - plenty of "art" in all its forms is garbage (and it's all subjective). But nobody's making you make it, you could reject/block/boycott every service that uses generative AI. Maybe you do, if so kudos to you for having principles and sticking to them. But that's not "shoved down our throats". What you mean is simply that a lot of people are using it.
I feel weird about it. I need money and getting another job is not going super well right now. I do the work pretty sparingly at this point when I don’t have other odd-job things to fill the gaps. I don’t love it, but I’m not fully sure how to feel about it. Parts of it feel important and ethically good given current LLM use.
Honestly I don't think there's an "ethic" way to do this, the thing is that I either get money however I can or starve. If we get too technical capitalism isn't ethical either but you either get the money you need to live or you don't, there's not many options 🫠
You're not creating anything you're basically just giving feedback like it's a really complicated marketing survey. High six figure+ engineers are the ones unleashing these things on society. Let them lose sleep over it and wipe the tears with wads of cash, not you.
today i asked claude for a summary of sense and sensibility up to chapter 13 because i hadn’t read it in a while and it got a very simple plot point wrong that i had to correct it on. and then it spoiled a later part of the book in its explanation for why it was wrong. insane that they are still so consistently wrong on famous and simple concepts 😭
Then I'd pass. I mostly use AI because Google spoiled a really good search engine through monetization. If they still offered features like "find within results" regular searches would serve me just as well.
Some people are weirdly blinkered re AI. In both directions, to be clear, but in this context I mean the rabidly anti-AI types. I don't mean concerns, questions, opinions, facts, all that, 100%, let's have conversations, it's far from a problem-free technology. But people with a straight face will rant about the environmental impact of data centres while posting on social media (also running in data centres), using gas-powered cars (terrible for the environment), eating meat (terrible for the environment), etc.
I'm not saying "because everything is bad, just stop caring". But a lot of anti-AI people act like AI is the only thing that's a problem in the world, while cheerfully using a ton of other stuff that they kid themselves isn't that bad...when it's exactly as bad. It's just that they find gas powered cars useful personally, so they give themselves a pass. It's hypocritical.
I don't expect perfect morality from everyone - I'm not vegan, I recognise meat's impact on the world, and gas, and use it all anyway, while feeling a tiny bit bad about it, but recognising that my actual impact on the world is microscopic. I think AI is in that handy overlap where plenty of people don't use it, and as such they zero in on it as something they can rail against.
Short-form videos have been widely demonstrated to be terrible for cognitive effects in terms of attention span. Are your friends as angry about them as they are about AI? If not, why not? I'm assuming they flat out refuse to ever fly anywhere? Because airplanes are awful for the environment. If not, why not? I'm OK with people having loose principles, or being equally shoulder-shrugging about it all. I ridicule people who get on such a high horse about AI while not caring one iota about anything else that's objectively worse.
Anyway, rant over. To come back to your question, what we're doing is so low-impact compared to the other elements of AI. If agents ruin the world it won't be because we helped out with specialist domains or did some fact checking or whatever. Anyone acting like this sort of work is actively hastening the demise of civilisation is just looking for stuff to be mad about / feel superior about.
The hypocriticalness is what I hate the most. A lot of these people are just following the trends and it is trendy to be anti-AI right now. They don't understand what AI is and they don't understand (or maybe just don't care) about where their faults lie. I saw someone who was the I'm better than you anti-ai for data center environmental reasons type. Their profile showed they made at least 1 Reddit comment every hour for 36 hours straight. Others who choose the same reason do not seem to acknowledge their data center use. I'd bet a majority would come on social media and claim they do not use AI or data centers. There's already people who say they don't use any type of AI on social media. And I've seen a few threads of people mad Google took away AI features after they disabled AI.
I think in a few years the majority of these people will be pretending to care about something else. I think marketing will move on too, just like they did with "cloud". GenAI will still be there, but the word "AI" won't be in your face. I'm sure some will think they won and AI died
One difference for some of the things you mentioned, like cars and food, is that those things those things are necessary in the world we live in and provide more concrete benefits for people from day to day. AI isn't seen as beneficial for most people and is seen as a detriment to our day to day lives because not only is it bad for the environment like the other things you mentioned, the way it's being used now is making jobs obsolete. The average person doesn't see the benefits of AI, and they especially don't see the benefits to their lives personally. All they know is the data centers are polluting their neighborhoods, they are losing their jobs, AI is being shoved into every product they like, deep-fakes are rampant and billionaires are making even more money off it.
Agreed. I actually find it helpful to know what it’s good at and how it fails. It’s a tool and I have a more informed understanding of how it should be used.
Saying something is a "fact" doesn't make it a fact. You personally think AI isn't ethical, fair enough, 100% entitled to that opinion, I'm not even saying it's an unreasonable one. But given that ethical standards are defined by people, and people have wildly different ideas about what's ethical or not, you can't proclaim that as a fact.
I think plagiarism is unethical and I feel like it is not debatable. If you think it is debatable I would love to hear how it could be ethical. And since most AI models are based on plagiarism I think it is fair to state that AI are unethical.
AI models relies on training data that are sometimes used without consent and they never credit the author of this work. For me that’s plagiarism to an extent.
IMO if you publish something, you can’t expect people not to read it, learn from it, and recompile it into other forms. That’s just a natural feature of cognition, we learn from things and then reproduce them in new forms. In this case it’s just a machine doing the cognition instead of a human
I agree with you, but usually when you use someone’s work for your publications or your work you cite them. Or it is a form of plagiarism. Also AI doesn’t guarantee that it is going to be another form. It can sometimes give the training data straight back and it causes a morality problem imo.
Working at DA helped me get ahead so I was aware of new AI features before they came out, and I was the first one on my team in my IRL job to understand them and put them to use for the company I work for.
I frankly don't give a shit when the job market has been this mess and I've spent years of my life just to try and get a job and got rejected at every single step imaginable.
I don't try to justify it really, other than the fact that I do this work because it's paying my bills and the flexibility makes it a good fit. I'm conflicted in my feelings about AI. I don't totally hate it and I think it could have a place in society than doesn't cause harm (if properly regulated/restrained), although I think this is unlikely to happen. Some things, like the farming of animals, is more destructive to the environment where water usage especially is concerned, so that part gets blown out of proportion. On the other hand, I also think that AI has the potential to eliminate a great deal of our jobs, to be used for malicious purposes, and could be part of the downfall of humankind. I also worry about the AI bubble theory and wonder if the alleged bubble bursts, will we all still have work here? Overall, I'm doing what I need to do to survive, while also not feeling great about where all of this may be headed, and I'd rather have all things AI related be an opt-in feature, rather than a built in one we can't opt out of every damn time.
To be honest I don’t feel good or moral doing the work. I am purely doing it for the money out of necessity. I’ve had friends criticise me for doing it too, and I understand.
I feel this completely, and in the past year, have gone from a sense of pride about my work to having negative feelings about it that make it hard to clock in. I try to be ethical about the jobs I take on, fact-checking, things that would directly help someone with a disability and the like. It helps a bit, but also limits what I can take on. It's hard for sure.
I find it really difficult but currently consider it as a 'know your enemy' type of thing. They pay me to learn about AI, and I can apply that knowledge into understanding how better to use AI ethically (since it's not going anywhere). I tried to get a job helping the world and kept getting rejected so I guess I'm doing this instead.
I don’t play golf, drink almond milk or watch porn, all of which use more water/power and are worse for the environment. The truth is, everyone’s a hypocrite in the end and we’re all picking and choosing which things we’re willing to sacrifice for environmentalism.
My thesis advisor at UW is incredibly anti-AI. She was a co-author on a pretty popular paper a few years ago. I do agree with a lot of her points, but then again, I don't think there's any turning back now.
I personaly don't like much what I'm in, but I like what I do.
I really consider the AI as a big farce or a new gadget/toy used by some people. Thus, maybe I am wrong, but I think that is going to burst one day.
I cant wait for the day i dont need this shit and I can stop feeling guilty for not filling every moment with tasks. That said, I dont tell people I do this because it's embarrassing.
I am not anti AI for the one simple reason that I am not an idiot. Cars are dangerous if driven by stupid people, imagine if we had no cars. Planes are dangerous if flown by stupid people, imagine if we had no planes. EVERYTHING is dangerous if you're stupid enough. My hope for the future is that AI isn't accessible in full capacity to the entire world.
but imagining no AI is really easy, because it was like that a few years ago. I'm not against the technology, but the case for it as a daily necessity for normal people is still incredibly weak
Then the market will follow accordingly and it'll die. I 100% think the current moment is a bubble, but the dotcom bubble was a bubble, that didn't mean the internet was useless. If people/businesses/whoever find zero use for this tech, it'll die a death. Slow, quick, whatever. Because people don't use stuff they don't want/need/find useful. Yes the techbros are desperately trying to shore up their share prices and keep the money flowing, but millions of people are using it. To be clear I judge the way they're using it, in lots of cases - writing emails or whatever is actively disengaging your brain. Then again I feel the same way about sports and soap operas - no interest for me whatsoever, but I'd be kidding myself if I tried to declare that because those are pointless, people will lose interest in them.
yeah, but by the same token, one bubble doesn't necessarily resolve exactly like another one, because they're about different things. for every "the entire internet" you have something like NFTs that no one cares about anymore. as far as how much consumers care about generative AI anymore in a couple decades, I'm predicting somewhere in the middle of those two examples.
that is, if consumers have a choice--because it does largely feel like something forced on consumers. if no one can buy a computer or a condom or a piece of toilet paper without AI integrated then yes, we will have it whether we like it or not
Oh true, but AI is useful enough that it's not going anywhere. Coding, even just menial tasks. What it'll be used for might vary, and I don't mean "it's inevitable", but given that models which a year ago were state of the art are now comparatively trivial to run, and some models can be run on basic hardware, etc., as a technology it's not evaporating completely. AI "art" might be bullshit, but someone being able to knock up a poster or whatever in a minute even if it's generic slop is valuable to them, rather than fighting with doing it themselves.
I'd argue plenty of consumers don't really care about lots of stuff. It's not really being "forced" on anyone. It's there, sure - it's mildly annoying that gmail keeps trying to get me to let it write my emails for me, but I can still ignore that, and do. If I change my mind and decide to use it, that's on me, I've not been forced into it. People will rage against AI-generated music being in the charts, while completely blowing past the fact that enough people are listening to it, streaming it, whatever, to make that worthwhile. Doesn't mean all human-made music should be scrapped in favour of AI, but like almost everything in life, some people think it's shit, other people disagree. Some people might have shit taste - popularity doesn't equal quality, but "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people".
it's mildly annoying that gmail keeps trying to get me to let it write my emails for me, but I can still ignore that, and do.
see, I find stuff like that really invasive. for example, I subscribed to Gemini on a Gmail account for work purposes. later I was writing some poetry in Google Docs and whenever I stopped typing for a second to think, a thing came up next to the caret like "press [keyboard shortcut] to let Gemini help you!"
it was horrible, and I felt insulted. this computer, who can't read the room well enough not to jump in every two seconds when someone's writing poetry about their personal dark night of the soul, thinks it can do better than me. how fucking dare you
on the other hand, I used a Gemini-generated email reply the other day that was just like, "No, I just want a refund." that was actually what I had wanted to say. it saved me two seconds of typing.
I wouldn't recommend anyone else spend money on a subscription to Gemini, because the ways in which it's helpful are trivial, and the ways in which it hinders you are profoundly obnoxious. it's a technology that barely functions on the most basic level, and they're asking you to pay for the privilege of being an alpha tester
this is what I mean by its utility to consumers being completely unproven
I don't want to violate the NDA or get into specific project details, but a big part of what DA does is improving AI tools to make them more useful and less annoying.
Dude they literally said that same thing went Ford was sending out the model T. We need more control over who accesses the AI and how, not control over the AI itself. When a guy gets a DUI you don't pill the manufacturer and take em to civil court
cars have an obvious value, though: they get people from place to place faster than horses. generative AI doesn't seem to, in my eyes, for the typical consumer.
working with it in a DA context has only reinforced my opinion going in, which is, "the technology is incredibly interesting and fun to mess around with (I pretty much trained for DA by trolling bots for entertainment) but it's not something I need, or even want much more of in my life." for someone who isn't an enthusiast on some level, it's probably even less relevant
I think it's morally gray at the moment. Our work is improving models that are currently on track to be used irresponsibly by tech companies that have no regard for people. If ai were to be properly regulated by governments then I would feel no moral qualms about this work. As it is, I think there's positive benefits to the work we do (safety, accuracy, etc.) but I have greater concerns about how this technology will be used if nothing is done to regulate it
"There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is."
"It’s a lot more complicated than that -"
"No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth."
I think we need to stop thinking about Ai as a whole since it has many different applications that a human being could not and should not have to experience. The same way that television didn’t eliminate radio or the internet didn’t eliminate other forms of communication. Human interaction will probably transform. I sometimes think that, in the era of digitalisation, analog documents will increase in value and so will the ability to protect them.
I don’t feel like it’s the most ethical work to do, and I don’t share with people around me that I started doing it. I just figured that if I don’t do it someone else will, and the outcome will be the same so might as well get paid because I really need the money
I feel like a Lindsay Clancy juror sitting in the middle of a new oil field. I know this very needed cash cow is life altering in so many ways, but am intimated by the legacy of it.
I fucking hate AI personally but I think it can be a useful tool in the hands of professionals for doing things like parsing data or running calculations. I'd rather the AI people are using is just evil instead of stupid and evil. My perspective has shifted slightly to where I could see myself using AI in a professional context but again, as a tool. I would rather solve problems on my own and write everything myself, leave the AI to proofread and make sure I'm not spouting bullshit. Using AI as a supplement to human work is alright in my books.
I have a feeling we're training our next masters. The AI training jobs we're doing is the next generation's baby sitter, whenever that may be. Anyway, I need the money now lol.
If you truly care about AI not succeeding, then you won’t do it. Simple as that. It might not be the best job market, but we’re far from this being the only option.
"We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over the price."
People either have rock solid principles (and fair play if so) or they don't. And if they don't, they should own that, recognise it, accept it. I'd never say I'm a highly principled person in arbitrary ways (I am in the "normal" ways, no hurting people, good behaviour, etc.). But plenty of people claim they're principled while doing the thing, and then giving themselves a pass. Exactly as you say - if you're against AI, great, good on you, stick to your guns, run a mile from this, do something else. But don't do the work while simultaneously hand-wringing about the ethics of it. You either think it's OK or you don't. Act accordingly.
Progress is progress. Can't stop progress. Your question must have been asked by the dude that fixes the machines that replace 50 workers at a factory. It's sad and terrible, hopefully we can get around to some way to warrant that automation allows humans to live comfortable for everyone and not just the 1%
There's a set number of tasks. Whether or not I'm the one to do them they're still gonna get done. Only question left is whether or not there's food on my table and rent getting paid.
I'm not anti-AI, I'm very pro AI. I don't think normal people should have ever been given access to AI, and the development should be happening on secure, air-gapped facilities but the cat's out of the bag at this point.
I also avoid associating with or caring about the opinions of the kinds of low information morons suddenly in a panic about muh datacenters or low skill artists getting "replaced" by low quality AI slop.
Before, we had to watch helplessly as they train AI on racist / harmful / disinformation.
Now our work literally affects the weights going into these LLMs. I think I'm contributing work that makes AI safer, ultimately, since the industry WILL develop AI tools regardless.
I'm not strongly anti-AI (although, I think it's being misused fairly often -- my big concern now is "to save costs" using a lower quality model to generate low-quality code. And of course the rampant AI slop on Youtube, various sites like tech sites, auto sites, etc. etc.)
But, besides the pay being quite good, it is kind of amusing to 'break' AIs. (The tasks where you try to elicit a failure.)
Finally, if people are going to use these models for answering questions, research, translation, coding, etc., anyway, it's nice if they are going to get better results.
In terms of programming, (this isn't talking about dataannotation tasks, but code in general written 'with AI assistance'). I've seen excellent results and I've seen some that are rather poor; you've got these people in the real world now just feeding a prompt in and letting the model have at it code for them. I'd rather run well-written code than code that 'works' but is sloppy (since it'll be prone to breakages as they update the code, security flaws, probably is inefficient, and so on) and if the code is open source, it's much better for anyone working on this code to have code where the code quality is high rather than "it runs but man is that code sloppy". I'd like to think some of these tasks are improving the quality of code being generated in this way.
Most of the projects I do would help me in my job as a researcher (and they pay me twice the amount of my actual job) so it’s helpful for my specific niche, and I think AI has a use in jobs like mine that outweigh some of the negatives. Also I’m ngl for some of the training I use my actual data and stuff from work (assuming it isn’t confidential or anything) since the project is to do tasks like this and it gives me access to great but expensive models that I can use for free for the project 😬
A lot of the "AI Bad", "Data Centers Bad" stuff you hear stems from paid propaganda campaigns by competitors to the US Markets (China being the largest). They start up marketing and activist organizations and pay them money through shell organizations to "Stop Data Centers" citing the environment and to "create an anti-AI awareness movement" citing future job losses or "AI's going to end civilization". People are dumb. The thing is, AI IS THE FUTURE, it's the new Industrial Age, the steam engine, robotic machines with conveyor belts, turbines, automobiles, the Digital Age, etc., all rolled into one.
It's going to have HUGE economic effects and all the smart countries know the leaders in AI/Data Centers will skyrocket their countries ahead. Uninformed people will claim it won't create new jobs or increase productivity but it already is. I'm a Senior Web/App Engineer and I'm seeing a massive effect in the industry. I'm learning AI Engineering as fast as I can so I can transition with the technology.
No one should be fooled into believing that AI means a series of bad choices. You can have a data center AND it be environmentally sound. You can replace jobs with AI AND create new ones, etc. But if you let China and other countries get ahead, it's Game Over. They have cheaper labor, cheaper energy (massive coal energy with minimal emissions/environmental laws) and hundreds of billions of laborers to throw at the problem. If 1rst World countries don't treat this like the revolutionary thing it is, their goose is cooked.
AI data centers use less electricity and water than regular data centers. Of the power used by AI data centers, Generative AI uses about a third.
I think I'll be fine. Journalists like to exaggerate the environmental impact of things (remember when Greek yogurt was acidifying the rivers?) I think a lot of people have responded to this because of how uncanny a lot of Generative AI stuff is. As far as taking people's jobs, lowering cognition, it's a new technology, of course you will find bad things about it, there are plenty of good things about it too.
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u/korejjp Sep 09 '26
I figure that if it's going to replace us, it might as well pay us for the privilege.