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Cory Doctorow: The people who tell you ‘AI is changing everything’ are lying
(www.thenerve.news)
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Okay.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/pollution-musk-unpermitted-xai-power-100200381.html
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/epa-exempts-off-grid-ai-power-plants-from-acid-rain-program-caps-affecting-60-sites/ar-AA28YctM
https://www.fastcompany.com/91229319/ai-data-centers-could-make-your-electric-bill-go-up-by-70
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/georgia-power-ai-data-centers-eminent-domain/
Power usage from AI data centers has already eclipsed power usage from all other data centers combined. If you can come up with a scenario where AI hasn't doubled in scale by 2030 by belching smoke into the atmosphere, I'll concede the point.
Yeah, and that's too fucking bad. If the people who made it don't want it to be used for AI training (and I don't think I've ever met a creator who has done the research on AI who does, even if they got paid), it shouldn't be.
Nukes. Possibly fusion. Possibly fusion accelerated into reality by use of LLMs to solve some of the remaining challenges.
https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-and-artificial-intelligence-use
https://cryptoslate.com/stop-shaming-bitcoin-when-daily-streaming-ai-and-social-media-scrolling-shown-to-consume-double-the-energy/
But the people who made it do want it to be in public libraries, accessible, seen, heard and otherwise distributed - would the majority of them rather that AI be trained on exactly what they wrote, or just hear-say?
...So you insist that AI power use isn't a big problem right now, but your best case scenario for the future is that humanity gets nuked out of existence. By nukes that were designed using help from LLMs, which they haven't been shown to be able to help with.
You seem like a very serious person who is worth debating.
As for the data use thing, firstly, I don't know why the choices are between the actual work and hearsay. I don't know where you got those two options from. I also don't know what would be producing the hearsay (human? LLM? If the latter, are we straight up admitting to copyright laundering? Also, I thought training LLMs on output of previous LLMs caused model collapse). I especially don't know why you're asking me to speculate on what creatives want immediately after attacking my ability to speak on behalf of creatives. But since you are apparently asking me to do that, I think they'd prefer the hearsay, since the point is that they don't want the model to be able to imitate their work for anyone who asks for cheap, and in so doing, put them out of a job. Or worse, have the model agree to a job they would have said no to, and damage their credibility and brand.
I'm sorry, you think this is a debate? It looks more like you parroting a bunch of whatever you like from your echo chambers, so go right on ahead.
Nukes above would refer to nuclear fission power generation which has, historically, been the cleanest least negatively impactful to human animal and plant health form of electrical power generation (per kWh generated) in history. When considering your non-renewable alternatives consider the wars fought for their control, the lives lost and ecological damage done in their extraction. When considering your renewable alternatives consider their ecological impact not only during operation, but also during construction and end of life disposal.
LLMs are accelerating research and development in the sciences and engineering - at least any actual scientists and engineers I have contact with are acknowledging their utility - not bolts of lightning from the sky universe altering changes, but helpful, in the way that computers and mechanical calculators before them were helpful - faster and easier to get things done than the previous alternatives.
Maybe think about it, then. Did you ever play "the telephone game" in school? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game
If writers are producing valuable information, that information may be passed on to the next generation directly through their writings, or as repeated by people who have (in your esteemed estimation) read that information and then repeated it later in their lives whether intentionally, or indirectly, and usually somewhat inaccurately.
LLMs will be trained on something - would it be better for that something to be the original source material, or the regurgitations of it by employees hired by the LLM training companies? Employees who read something original in school and are now passing that knowledge into the LLM training as best they can remember?