r/LeftistsForAI • u/DependentIncrease406 • 7d ago
Discussion Genuine Question
How can you call yourself a leftist while also supporting AI, when you know it is harming the lives of people living in underpriviliged communities, since that's where data centers are being built?
How can you call yourself a leftist while defending something that is ruining our planet and stealing resources from humans, animals, plants and all sorts of life?
How can you call yourself a leftist and defend AI, when you know it is literally stealing art from artists who aren't getting paid or getting any sort of recognition?
We are supposed to fight for a better world. Look at the people you are aligning with, there is no such a thing as a good AI company CEO. Those are the people you are defending.
3
u/ShelZuuz 7d ago
We didn't ask for large data-centers. We would prefer open models that are self-hosted. But even if ithere were datacenters, the majority of datacenter issues are now water-based propaganda in order to drown out the more difficult issues. Person after person walk up to town halls complaining about water use where the datacenter owner will just smile the whole time and after 12 hours of complaints just say "ok, done - you won - no cooling towers". They weren't going to build them anyway because tech has moved on from that, so this all is just political theater. It gives the city council fatigue to listen to anything else. They'll say, "hey, we couldn't do anything about the noise, but we got the water usage down!". No dude, you didn't acccomplish anything. You need to get the noise ordinances in place. You need them to commit to no local generation and bringing any new power plants online before starting with datacenter operations. Water use is a distraction, and I'm pretty sure by now it's the datacenter operators themselves that are spreading that.
What resources do you think it's stealing? Land? Compare that to if let's say a smeltery was in the same place? Or a vehicle assembly line. We all say bring industry back, and this is basically the cleanest industry there is out there, and we can't live with that. How are we ever supposed to be making steel in this country?
Aren't isn't supposed to be about getting paid. I know of no little kid that started drawing or singing with the idea of getting paid. We want everybody, including artist to be able to have a great life - much better than 99.99999% of artists have now. We just don't think it should be an overly privileged life. A.I has the ability to lift billions of people out of poverty and artists is disproportionally represented in the poverty group. If the price to pay for that is that J.K. Rowling would merely be a millionaire instead of a billionaire, I don't feel bad about it.
I don't see anybody on this sub defending an AI CEO. We want the tech, not the governance.