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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30, @09:52PM (4 children)
I suspect the same. It was even proven in the BLM protests where foreign adversaries would play both sides online to create more discord. Its not only China but Russia, Iran and anyone else who wants to play.
The counterbalance though, is why did our institutions adopt the policies willingly? While woke was used for information warfare, it was also an official position. A little of it can be excused by the same corporations bending to Trump, but that only goes so far.
Taking it further, much of the COVID response was also based on emulating China and for all intents was a psyop for nefarious purposes. They needed to use it as cover for their own internal issues like HK. Notice that all of that went away. But what did western countries need it for? The information about the lethality of the virus was settled early on during those cruise ships.
Now these datacenters are being pushed and I don't believe that it's all for generative AI. It's not that it will drink up all the water or electricity, it's that it will be used for the surveillance state without our consent. The unanswered question is where is this capacity going and what will it be used for REALLY. Ain't some training runs and chatGPT or the models wouldn't exist right now.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 30, @11:10PM (3 children)
And it appeared rather lethal at first - 2% fatality rate among people who showed symptoms. That later went down around 1.2% fatality rate.
Why would they need that much computing for the surveillance state? We aren't generating that much data even if they monitor our every step.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 31, @02:17PM (2 children)
Those initial fatality stats were from China. Diamond princess stats showed mostly 70+ people already one foot out the door were the chief victims. We put up with quite a few diseases that are more than 1-2%, although the final fatality I think ends up being something like. 0.88% when covid all said and done. It should have driven public policy but it didn't. We don't shut down everything for those others.
I also disagree that video, audio, internet traffic, associations and the analysis that has to be run on them and stored for the longer term doesn't generate that much data. You have the information itself and the predictive models trained for and used on it, running constantly. Both private and government efforts since they're getting hard to tell apart.
And let's say I was completely wrong, model hosting and training also doesn't take up the capacity they are building on it's own. Did you have some plausible alternative you were going to say?
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Monday August 31, @06:26PM
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday September 01, @01:53AM
I'd start with model hosting and training actually. That can scale up. There's a lot of huge data bases out there in commerce. They'd be useful to a surveillance state, but they have independent business uses. On the model hosting/training thing, I see claims that it'll triple (I think from 2025 to 2030 span). That's a huge increase in demand for data centers right there.
My take is that people can only generate so much data. It's a lot, but we're looking at massive data storage. For example, storing all phone calls in the US per year is presently under 300 petabytes per year. This 2013 estimate [archive.org] guesses that total cost would be around $30 million plus $2 million per year in electricity costs. They cite another estimate that is quadruple that.
Suppose everyone had a mandatory body camera generating high definition video (with audio) of 1 GB/hour. That would be over 300 petabytes per hour for the entire US population. Crudely 10,000 times more data generated than for uncompressed phone conversations. So a year's storage (uncompressed) would be around $300 billion in assets plus $20 billion per year on electricity. That's using 2013 technology with 2013 prices.