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from the Where-can-I-get-a-bot-to-work-my-farm? dept.
The Global Government Affairs team over at X dropped a bombshell Thursday night, revealing that the X Safety team had uncovered proof positive of a foreign influence campaign targeting the build out of AI and data centers in the United States:
It turns out that, after launching an investigation, the team uncovered a massive bot farm consisting of roughly 200,000 "suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts," including hundreds that appear to have been trying to manipulate debate in the U.S. over artificial intelligence, data centers, and the associated energy costs.
This development comes after President Trump warned last month that "other nations are trying to get us to slow down" and are spending money on "propaganda" to convince Americans that data centers aren't a positive thing.
According to X, about 200 accounts within the bot farm network were posting claims that data centers drive up household electricity prices and put excessive strain on the power grid. Some of the accounts, ironically, posted AI-generated cartoons depicting data center operators getting rich while ordinary American citizens were stuck paying the bill.
[...] The insidious thing about this kind of foreign influence operation is that it preys on the concerns that many Americans already have about the data centers popping up in their communities – debates about things like electric bills and the robustness of the power grid are already happening here. All a foreign adversary like China has to do is amplify those fears and sow distrust to make it harder for the U.S. to keep building out its AI infrastructure.
Related:
- Protesters Haul A Guillotine To City Council Meeting About A Potential AI Data Center
- Texas Halts Data Center Connections to Power Grid Amid Overwhelming Demand
- The Fight Against AI Data Centers is Important – but It's Just a Starting Point
- 'Cost Me the Election': Data Centers Trigger Voter Backlash
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Sunday August 30, @08:46PM (6 children)
They do indeed use a boatload of electricity. That's unavoidable.
But the rest is optional. If they're allowed to, they can use significant water - though less than a lot of agriculture would use (for example, corn [soylentnews.org] or alfalfa [soylentnews.org]) - and make a lot of noise. If not so bothersome, well it's far from the worst thing that could be next door to you. Even normal residential areas can be a nuisance with noise, traffic, and runoff pollution.
It's so frustrating to deal with the same talking points over and over.
My view? Get the noise under control and have them pay for the infrastructure they use, then they would be among the best neighbors you could have.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Gaaark on Sunday August 30, @10:13PM (5 children)
When was the last time you ate AI?
I'd rather have a pantry full of food.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 30, @11:05PM (4 children)
How many full pantries of food do you need? There's massive overproduction of food at present. And to give an idea of how misplaced that concern is, I found out while researching for previous SN discussions that in early 2025 global data center acreage was around 400k acres. Alfalfa acreage in the state of Utah was around 750-800k acres at the same time. So the state of Utah by itself had almost twice as much area devoted to growing a particular crop for livestock (though alfalfa can be used as part of a crop rotation since it's a legume), as the entire world had devoted to data centers. I see predictions that maybe data center area will triple by 2030 from the 2025 numbers. Sure, that's a substantial rate of growth, but it's temporary. They won't be doing that through the bursting of the bubble.
Sure, I get that people don't want to live next to a cooling system as loud as an airplane engine or pay high amounts for electricity. But I also get that banning data center construction when all you need is modest regulation to keep them in line. These aren't dangerous industrial zones. They just have relatively minor potential for nuisance that can be dealt with rationally. And aside from the spectacular electricity consumption, there isn't that much in the way of resource consumption or pollution generation from these things - some electrical waste and modest consumption of the stuff that's already been talked about.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday August 30, @11:31PM (3 children)
When was the last time you NEEDED to eat, versus when was the last time you NEEDED AI?
NO one NEEDS AI... everyone NEEDS to eat.
Progress for stupids' sake is just stupid.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Monday August 31, @12:53AM (2 children)
I haven't NEEDED to eat in a long time. Sure, if I stop eating, I'd soon die. But there's long been plentiful food so that level of NEED never happened (aside from my first summer in college when I was trying to live on mac and cheese). My view is if I should live significantly longer than a normal human lifespan, hypothetically, it won't have much to do with a bit more land area for agriculture and everything to do with the advanced science and bioengineering which that better AI helped make possible.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @03:42PM (1 child)
Wish I could mod this post as "full retard"
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Monday August 31, @06:20PM
Sounds like I should be glad you can't. And perhaps you should be glad as well! For here is an opportunity for you to learn something.
First, let's consider what "NEED" means. Not dying, right? At first glance, food seems to be such a "NEED". You can't go more than a couple of weeks or so without dying. But the problem with that is that there's so much food production in the developed world that starvation just isn't a problem. Meanwhile someone at 20 years old, a common age for people who think they know what "full retard" can expect to live another 50-70 years on average. Current health care won't push it much more than that. It's more palliative theater than practical for the elderly. If you want to live another 100 or 100k years, it will NEED more than health care and undetectably more land devoted to agriculture.
AI, even the rudimentary stuff we have now, can help make that happen. NEED that ignores real world needs is bullshit.