AI Protest in Montreal | Hacker News Reader

AI Protest in Montreal

montrealgazette.com

53 pointshmokiguess87 comments

I'm really hoping AI does not become the next political culture war thing, but I'm afraid it probably already is moving in that direction; though it does at least seem that the dividing lines won't be red vs blue this time.

There are already widespread attempts, by both red and blue proponents of AI, to paint opposition to AI as being from the other side. Hopefully those ad-hominem arguments will peter out as it becomes clear that opposition is bipartisan.

The Department of War is posting memes against Effective Altruism on Twitter and Bernie Sanders is putting out video of him talking to Elizier Yudkowsky.

It is already a political culture war topic.

> The Department of War

Ironically, the first things that pops into my mind when I hear that nickname, is back when actually used to be called that, and they showed "Don't Be a Sucker":

> Admonishes Americans that they will lose their country if they let fanaticism and hatred turn them into "suckers." "Let's forget about 'we' and 'they' -- let's think about us!" In the context of the emerging Cold War, this film appears paradoxical - https://archive.org/details/DontBeaS1947 (1945)

It feels like the data center situation has many people seeing it as a Big Business vs average people fight instead of red vs blue. Even the president's posts about it all being Chinese propaganda are falling a bit flat.

I feel like that was always going to be the outcome with how many of these datacenter projects have been conducted. Shady backroom deals, hearings deliberately arranged to be impractical for residents to attend, residents’ opposition being ignored, no regard for impact on the surrounding area, etc.

The pace may have been a little slower, but I doubt that there’d been a fraction as much backlash had they played nice and more consideration been taken. Nobody really cared about data centers until a few hastily implemented ones made nuisances of themselves.

Vaccines and 5G (remember European kooks burning down cell towers?) became political culture wars, so this is unlikely to be any different.

Some phenomena are pushed from above, while others result from pure skepticism from below.

"Vaccines and 5G" refer to direct health concerns; "AI" is a shorthand name for "what if" scenarios.

they became echo chambers because foreign agit-prop efforts got to them, hard, and the GOP needed to keep their base riled up to stay elected

Seeing the US public, this does't seem much like a culture war. Maybe culture consensus would be more apt. I would have a hard time finding large groups of people vehemently arguing for data centers or more AI at a town hall or something.

More like class war.

>though it does at least seem that the dividing lines won't be red vs blue this time.

You'd think. Every single person unreasonably skeptical of AI that I know of usually comes from blue echo chambers.

I think it's a very common human trope to believe that we are in end-times. I imagine the overlap between the people that believe that AI will end humanity and those that believed climate change will end humanity 10 years ago is pretty significant. Before that it was people that believed in the rapture.

Sure one of these things could technically end humanity within our lifetimes. But the fact that the end of humanity has been predicted for as long as humans have been around is telling.

> I think it's a very common human trope to believe that we are in end-times. I imagine the overlap between the people that believe that AI will end humanity and those that believed climate change will end humanity 10 years ago is pretty significant.

Everyone knows why they're building this stuff (to replace labor, and damn the consequences of people who work for a living), and I think that's the root of popular resistance.

Fears of species-ending catastrophe is an elite preoccupation (as the more likely economic catastrophe will leave them relatively unscathed). They also serve to show the utter insanity of the AI labs and the people who work for them: they have these fears but they're building the machines anyway.

The dividing lines always end up red or blue, there must be some kind of "social physics" law which states that these work as two attractors. Will the left or the right will end up rabidly pro-AI/anti-AI? Place your bets! Because you know it will happen.

It's not a culture war. It comes down to whether you care about the environment or not.

LLMs are destroying the planet.

what culture war? it's a class war mon ami.

i've met not a single meatspace human outside of techbros who were in favor of unlimited AI. most of the tech bros even conceeded that it could be terrible for everyone including themselves, but mostly laughed it off as #yolo or "we can't get the Chinese get ahead".

not one of those in favor of AI was making less than 200k a year.

they're already low-key priming people with Zechariah 13:8 -- "two-thirds will be cut off and perish"? -- on places like 8chan, or via "edgy" tuber channels like ssethtzeehtach, and it's not hard to see the writing on the wall if you're an average joe.

It's wild that there are people out there who hate a technology that can literally work for them.

I sincerely do hope AI resistance becomes the spark to the class war barrel of gunpowder. Especially given who stands to truly benefit from this technology.

No SNI

https://web.archive.org/web/20260917040811if_/https://montre...

https://web.archive.org/web/20260917040811/https://montrealg...

I'm really disappointed by the lack of real information in a lot of these protests. The vast majority of people opposing AI that I've seen online and in real life all cite the same misinformation about water use, data centers creating EMFs that kill birds, etc. And a lot of these people are smart, college educated folks. It just goes to show how powerful memes that reinforce your biases can be.

Is it surprising that people who get most of their information from algorithms tailored by the industry they are protesting are ill-informed about the actual problems those companies are creating?

People can feel the misalignment, but they don't understand it. That's the future we are accelerating towards

These things you list and more have a lot of power even if there's a slight chance of them being true. The average person doesn't see any benefit to a data center near them, so they're unwilling to even risk a single drawback. The best case as they see it is that a new data center will result in no net gain for themselves.

This is a pervasive technology that--from most people's perspectives--has primarily negative effects and is promoted primarily by people with negative intentions.

Protests are more than understandable.

Interesting that only open ai logo is used, at least from the pictures, maybe it’s the easiest to draw.

I think the biggest concern for Canada and the EU is that the US and China will work together on a joint "AI non-proliferation" agreement much the same way that nuclear weapons came to be restricted by the countries that already had the capability. This will lead to a de facto "techno-colonization" of the rest of the world between themselves.

Trump and Xi are reportedly discussing this concept in their upcoming summit.

Then maybe the EU and Canada should start innovating, so they can have a seat at the table rather than just wringing their hands about it.

Whither Mistral? Or Yoshua Bengio?

Has Mistral released anything worthwhile in the past 6 months compared to the Chinese and American labs? Mistral Medium and Shieldstral? Qwen27B and Deepseek were released the same week as Mistral which... certainly took the wind out of its sails.

Yoshua Bengio is a gem, LLMs don't exist without him. But what has Canada done as a whole in terms of releasing anything approaching Astra, GLM, etc.?

I see AI is a capital game, not really an innovation game. Plenty of the innovation that led to AI today came from Canadian and European researchers. To be at the top of AI, you must have focused capital, which Canada and EU have been lacking in compared to US and China.

Why should they give a shit what some foreign despots agree to?

This concern carries within it the assumption that having LLMs gives the parties as much influence as what nuclear weapons do in warfare. An assumption that should probably be checked.

I like how they carry posters from Matrix, Terminator, etc. They know the difference between fantasy and real life, right?

Or they are promoting a language where the lower viscera speak to lower viscera. A zombie-like contagion in which the spreading is through suggestive imagery.

Pornographic enrollment: images towards lower excitement, to enlarge the number of the lowerly excited.

Our machines are now more intelligent than most humans, which would have qualified as "fantasy" as recently as 3 years ago. Clearly some people will only give up on this flawed reasoning exactly when the robot boot is pressed against their throat lmao.

Just because there are fantastical elements to these stories doesn't mean their themes can't be poignant examinations of where the real world is headed.

We're not in a giant simulation, but technology is causing people to lose contact with reality, and our lives increasingly become about keeping a giant "machine" running.

We may not have a SkyNet in charge of our nuclear missiles, but should we not be concerned about AI making life-and-death decisions in war?

Are you familiar with the concept of rhetoric? This is something similar.

Can you use known cultural elements to get your message across. That's not a new concept

First world problems

AI affects the poor the most. It can have consequences with regards to military, privacy, security and finances of everyday people.

Should this be retitled to: “Old men shake fists at sky”?

Where were all of these protests for social media?

Protestors covering their faces = taking Roko’s Basilisk seriously?

Bread and circuses. Flood the zone with shit.

Some of their arguments are more than just naive ones.

They argue that LLMs are stealing our culture to feed it back to us. Can we really argue that they didn't make use of everything we wrote and said online to train their data?

I mean, the CEO of Microsoft would agree with them:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-s...

Yeah honestly, I see a future where people start suing for reparations over things like this.

"I would like my $18 for reddit shitposts, plz"

I bet in many cases, the history of a single reddit account is worth substantially more than $18

what kinda money we talkin here?

> They argue that LLMs are stealing our culture to feed it back to us.

How is that any different from what media already did.

Most of Disney's original material was European cultural stories.

There's a rather large difference in scale for a start.

Indeed. Disney's cultural impact has been far greater.

Actual humans were involved in that process, implying creativity, intent, craftsmanship went into the final work, not just a mechanical process.

I agree with you, and also wish the wakeup call had come when the Mouse locked up our culture. (Copyright Act of 1976 Shifted the framework to the life of the author plus 50 years, Or 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act pushed individual protection to the life of the author plus 70 years)

Maybe now the wakeup call is loud enough to actually wake more people?

You got it

This question is in bad faith. There are plenty of obvious differences and the poster knows it.

Nobody's livelihood was affected by appropriating old folk tales.

Where did you see this? The only claim I saw from the article was that 1 prompt uses 16oz of water, which is obviously false if you do any level of research

Talk to people. Most are exposed to “AI” through endless social media slop that has taken over the majority of their feeds, not coding assistants. There are also job fears (not unwarranted, due to how AI leaders talk), and of course the DC issues. It is a weird political block but a very potent issue for some. I know both of my older teens want nothing to do with the stuff.

I've barely looked into this but I don't understand the water usage thing. Are people under the impression that water is a one-time consumable like a video game, where you "use" it and then it's gone forever?

I've seen people claim that the data centers are creating "unusable" water whatever that means.

Are the datacenters are sending water-filled rockets to Jupiter so we can't use it again?

It's a spectrum, I think a majority of people with that stance just think "AI datacenters consume water" and that's as sophisticated as it gets. A more realistic nuanced take would be that "AI is evaporating water which then rains in the ocean, decreasing our supply of fresh water".

Clearly the water isn't atomized. But where I live, each year nature presents us with a certain amount of water to allocate as we see fit. It's not like the water the golf course uses goes to Jupiter. But you probably don't want to pay to be able to drink it after. Right?

So what's the solution? Another rent-seeking system where any future information an AI learns about the world has to be carefully attributed for the possibility that someone might take a piece. A whole patent-troll/music industry style mass buy up of AI information rights with a team of lawyers sending out DMCA warnings hooked into every harness.

Does it get paid out on training or is it like music where if the model output is vaguely similar to something someone else created they get a royalty.

Even if the solution is difficult, I don't think that justifies theft.

Imagine actually asking permission to use other people's work to train AI. Imagine respecting the answer of "no".

But it would be unprofitable to ask permission!

I mean.. it feels kinda weird to say that you get to determine how other people use your work? Once you've sold your product, it's out in the open and available for use however the customer wants to use it.

If I bought a cake from your bakery, and then said "I'm going to serve it at my friends' gay wedding!", you couldn't be "hey, no, I don't approve of that". You've already sold me the cake; no take-backsies.

And if I buy a hammer, the hardware store doesn't get to tell me what I'm allowed to build.

If you're arguing for abolishing copyright, I'm all for it.

But as long as copyright exists, AI training should not get any exception to it. That creates an asymmetry, where AI gets to rip off our work and use it to compete with us, while we don't get to do the same with proprietary works (e.g. software).

I don't want a world in which AI can rip off all of my Open Source code and not respect its license, but I can't take macOS and virtualize it and not care what Apple thinks of that.

> If you're arguing for abolishing copyright, I'm all for it. But as long as copyright exists, AI training should not get any exception to it.

AFAICT, the courts currently lean towards allowing AI to be trained even without author permission, and this doesn't violate copyright law.

Copyright law says you can't sell unauthorized copies of copywritten works. Doesn't say you need to get author permission before using their works to train AI.

Yes, the courts are leaning towards creating the exception that I said should not exist, giving an advantage to AI companies over the humans that created the work they've trained on. That is not surprising, but it's still harmful.

So long as the AI company owns a copy of the copywritten work.. does training on it represent an "exception"?

They're not reproducing the work for sale, no? So how does training violate CR law?

Preparing a derivative work, and distributing that.

What is made public and available is treated as such. We do not ask permission to enable neural changes consequent to expressions of people in the open.

Uhh yes. If you can't properly cite the sources you ripped off in training, you shouldn't be publishing the model.

The AI protestors in the article are holding up signs that say AI will kill us all.

They think this is a doomsday technology. They’re not in the streets over a concern about cultural appropriation in LLM training sets.

Too much Terminator.

I find their arguments are less naive than the ones who used to say 5G controls our brains just few years ago. I remember personally back in 2021 when we used 5g to fly drones, very educated individuals claimed they don’t feel ok and are sick because they stood next to the tower for few hours because they heard 5g is bad!! just a normal 5g, not even mmwave or anything similar.

AI can be useful no doubt, I think most of people who are against AI aren’t against the concept itself, they are against the business built around it, the greed that will use AI to destroy the quality of life, the mass surveillance that won’t be possible without AI, destroying rare books for AI training, slopification of everything you see around from texts to images to videos, among other legitimate reasons to hate it. Open ai used to be a non for profit, I don’t think anyone protesting AI now would have issues with the company few years ago, when the main focus was research, solve issues, cure diseases, among many other good reasons.

AI is using water lol. I worry for education system if people think that cooling “uses up” water somehow.

Making hydrogen destroys water, ban it

Don't be so snarky, right now its actually true because they pump drinking water directly from the grounds and evaporating them into the air and therefore taking local water and putting it in some ciruclation which will not refill the local water...

> a single fully processed wafer can ultimately consume anywhere from 3,100 to nearly 5,000 liters of water by the time it is finished.

source: AI

Shit man any minute and we will run out

AI is absolutely pervasive at this point. I don't think there is a way to put the cat back in the bag. I am not going so say "unfortunately" because I don't have to write tests anymore and so that makes me happy...

Is water going to be a problem? Yeah, I guess so for a while, until they figure out what to do... but all these protests are so pointless: whales, oil, water, war crimes, I've seen so many over the decades, and not a single one worked, not one.

Congratulations I guess to all that participate and carried on to live a life full of virtue and moral high ground, but in reality, their clothes, their food, their transport, their existence within a system are all going to be somehow linked to AI, if their are not already fully integrated.

They haven't figured out what to do about climate change yet though. Why do you assume it is ok to power on and someone else will fix tye problems for us?

No pressure would make it even worse.

But lets be honest, we were put into specific spots, we can't just get out.

We were able to just take land and make it ours, if you get put on a planet were everything is owned, the critisism were your food and cloth is coming is not their fault.

Its not pointless. It might have less impact than it should, but its not pointless.

I've really been liking the car analogies for AI lately.

Personally i dislike driving, i dont like cars or trucks or traffic, yet i own a car. I can protest cars and they wont go away. We could shutdown the 2 biggest automobile makers and it likely just messes with prices/availability for the general public, but doesnt put the genie back in the bottle, hell we can shut down all car manufacturing and it is the same lack of shutting down driving, it just creates a lack of surplus supply.

All these things are pretty true about AI as well, nothing puts the genie back in the bottle.

What we can do, is try to strive towards electric cars, stop putting lead in fuel, enforce laws so driving becomes safer etc. Same with AI, strive towards greener electricity, find some sort of solution to deal with the absurd noise problem that is pervasive across every single area any generated content touches. Build some structure so intelligence is accessible to the average person rather than only the privileged/governments.

One of the worst things about AI, i think is the timing of it. We have built our modern internet experience into auto suggestions, and have no way to filter out what is and isn't a real person's content, or even higher effort content, and all those suggestions have perverse incentives to GET suggested in the form of ads/clout/whatever. Pair that with the absurd noise problem generated content produces everywhere.

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