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Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

I know I’ll get downvoted into oblivion but I can’t help but think data center and ai backlash manufactured or is a psi-ops campaign by Russia or China

It doesn’t make any sense to me as the externalities are future not current and at no other point in time has the public cared about the future without first seeing concrete examples of harm. That hasn’t happened yet for data centers nor AI. It’s all “if, maybe, sometime in the future”

People will claim real harms but the connections are spotty at best. So it feels like people are stirring the pot. like if not Russia or China then just influencers doing it for rage bait for likes and subscribes

I’m not saying they are wrong, I can’t predict the future, I’m only saying it feels unusual for the reasons mentioned above

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> People will claim real harms but the connections are spotty at best.

This is a wild claim because it's trivially provable. There's been tons of reporting around the effect they have on the immediate vicinity, and that's without even getting into the unknown long-term effects.

Here's a decent piece, but there's plenty more out there if you look at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA

Is every single mad person doing investigative reporting and / or living next to a data center? No. But something doesn't have to personally affect me to know it's harmful.

Is it not trivially provable. That video you linked to is sensationalized. You can do the same to almost any topic.

At the start of the video they claim data centers are being built in growing neighborhoods as though it's a conspiracy. Everything is being built in growing neighborhoods, that's the defintion of a growning neighborhood. Speaking "Coffee shops are growing in XYZ city" in ominous tones doesn't make it actually ominous.

They when go on to say there are 4x the data centers since 2010. Streaming TV went from 10% to 98% between 2010 and 2025. And there are plenty of other similar things (spotify, youtube, tiktok) that need data centers. In other words, consumer demand. Don't want the data centers, stop using them. I'm sure HN traffic also grew

The entire video is just digging up random stuff and trying to make it sensational. Oh, you can hear birds near data centers if you filter out the noise? That's true of basically everything, freeways, roads, bread factories, veg canners, etc... They're sensationalizing random common facts to make a ragebait video.

Almost every major issue has bot networks from hostile countries playing both sides of any issue to intentionally cause chaos. I completely agree that russia, china, or some other country is fomenting anger here.

That and the other issues aside, I think AI companies have done this to themselves. They've gone around talking about replacing all human labor and becoming the companies that control robot god's that swallow the entire economy and put everyone out of work and might destroy man kind. Well saying that is gonna make people hate them and that will find an outlet somewhere

so what makes you think that you aren't responding to a bot intending to sway your opinion by giving a shape to your preconceived notions so that your position crystallizes further, right now?

OpenAI literally found Chinese accounts trying to use ChatGPT to generate anti-datacenter propaganda: https://openai.com/index/prc-linked-influence-operations-ai-...

From folks I've talked to in real life, it really does seem that way. They're getting their information from Facebook but it's mixed in with the "5G towers are killing all the bees" and the usual anti-vaccine rhetoric. Seeing that erin brockovich has jumped on the anti-data center bandwagon makes it even more suspicious to me.

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