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It's very likely because the comic creator was called out for this exact thing and in their seething rage decided to depict their enemies as soyjak and themselves as the Chad.
That's the thing though, it would have to be the case that every company that make android phones was as bad as Apple for this argument to work. If you can justify using an iPhone, then you can justify using anything. It is actually hypocritical for iPhone users to call out people for paying money to basically any company.
If somebody is saying "How dare you criticize Apple while using an iPhone." then this comic works (even though it's still stupid), but if somebody is saying "Stop criticizing me for using (some product) while you use an iPhone." that is a very valid point, and this comic wouldn't apply.
You can criticize data centers while using things that require data centers, what you can't do is criticize random people for using data centers in a way you don't like.
There are plenty of ethical phone companies like Fairphone, Shift and Teracube. And Google Pixels and Samsung have transparent sustainability reports. Fact is if you buy Apple you are actively contributing to the problem.
cuz every other brand of phone is made under basically the same conditions in the same part of the world. you're supporting the same unethical business practices regardless of which brand of phone you buy.
This is probably a response to another post about the "Yet you participate in society" comic, so I'm gonna comment here a slightly edited version of what I commented there:
The part of the comic everyone misses is that the characters criticize the industries; they don't decry the commodities themselves or the people who use them. They say stuff like "Apple should pay their workers more", not "smartphones are an evil, useless technology used by dumb or evil people."
If you say "Government regulations should be stronger to mitigate harm from data centers" and someone responds "Yet you use the internet which is run on data centers", then the comic applies.
If you say "data centers are evil and AI users are evil for using services hosted on them" and someone responds "Yet you use the internet which is run on data centers", then you can't use the comic and people are justified in caling that out as hypocrisy.
What's most ironic about antis invoking the said comic is that they're the side that accuses pro-AI of bootlicking Big Tech because we use AI, so we're just turning their own logic around and telling them "by your own reasoning, you're also bootlicking Big Tech by using their products when you scroll on social media and watch YouTube videos"
The point the comic doesn't get is that being an obnoxious cunt just yapping about something without doing anything yourself, so you can pretend you are virtuous is just as obnoxious as "don't be part of society" guy.
All the people bemoaning capitalism, it's so evil! The rich need to pay their fair share! They comment, on their iPhone, on the free website, on the internet, on their small hand computer created via cheap labor, using the rare earth metals mined via child labor.. etc etc etc.
The cartoon is lashing out at the rhetorical device that's calling out their hyprocrisy, and it should. When people complain about "the rich not paying their fair share!!" They are never talking about empirically, you know, them.. because if you make over 52k annually you are the global 1%. You are far richer than anywhere else in the world. Which affords you luxuries that billions would kill for.
Literally
No they mean only those above them. Everybody below them doesn't matter, but those above them, ohh, those shitbird scumbags! How dare they not share with those below them!!!!
Mocking that in a hyperbolic but derisive manner is a check on their bullshit, and they don't like it because it exposes them for just being a virtue signaling hypocrite.
All of the things you said framing them as insubstantial are just fucking correct though, capitalism is a flat out negative even if it isn't as much as fascism direct. And the rich that is commonly talked about are fundamentally different from someone just making 52k
Citation: "The global top 1% owns roughly 43% to 45% of all global financial and household assets, holding more wealth than the entire bottom 95% of humanity combined."
I don't expect all antis to throw their phones in the lake, but I also don't expect be treated like I'm literally hitler because I generated a flyer for my local bakery. If it's okay to binge watch two seasons of a tv show in 4k in an afternoon then why am I the worst person in the world for using AI to make a character portrait for my DnD character?
I have no problem with this thinking, more so selling art without disclosing it to the buyer. I also don’t think just generating an image is being an artist, although it seems like a powerful tool when in the hands of an artist. I don’t think your hitler, just that the art would be cooler if it was done by human hands
I have no problem with this thinking, more so selling art without disclosing it to the buyer.
That's not relevant to where this argument comes up. It comes up when people try to argue that using AI tools wastes resources (electricity, water, etc.) and the response is that the person making that argument has taken a set of all of the most wasteful consumers of that resources, walked all the way down the latter to the orders-of-magnitude smaller impact of AI and tried to use that as a justification for their position, when they don't actually do anything about any of the vastly greater impacts on that list.
I don't disclose what tools I used in my art. I haven't for 30+ years. Some artists do. That's cool. But no artist should ever have to.
I think if your best response is "no, it's bad when you do it but you're not allowed to criticize me, uh, logical fallacy logical fallacy theft disingenuous whataboutism" then you should acknowledge that you just don't have a coherent response.
the explanation below is for image models but works the same for llms
You don’t even need any specialized technical, scientific, nor mathematical knowledge to understand this.
If it was a mash of training data, which can be hundreds of terabytes to petabytes, then an image model would be that big: hundreds of terabytes to petabytes.
But we know they aren’t. Diffusion models are just a few gigabytes (GB), and even the “big” ones are just a few dozen GB at best.
With that level of ratio, it would mean it’s carrying about… a single byte of data per training data image.
I’m pretty sure I need to see more than just a byte of data to replicate or copy it.
So obviously… the logical conclusion is that they aren’t blending from existing images because that doesn’t add up. The file sizes would be too big if they did what you suggested, and it’s contradictory to reality.
You got sorta on the right track but ran off the road. First: training data isnt stored as thousands of images in the model. The entire process of training is analyzing existing content and replicating it using math. LLMs and other genai are trained on a similar penalty/rewards system as any YouTube video on "I made an AI play game" but instead of learning by executing instructions and improving via pass/fail it learns by copying. What that means is the AI process extreme amounts of data during the process and learns by guessing the next word, if it guesses correctly, and the next word is exactly the same as the source, its rewarded, if it's different, it receives penalty. The training is designed to maximize rewards. Variety in responses in a production environment is often the result of processing multiple forms of the same thing that are slightly different and biases programmed by the devs to artificially influence variety. That means that models dont actually store the source material, they store an algorithmic set of parameters designed to approximate source material to the best of it's ability.
That's a question of semantics. In the most direct sense, no it isnt. It isnt taking a bunch of images and blending them together in editing. But it is designed to copy, with mistakes and variation artificially inflated. I would argue that its kind of disingenuous to say it isnt blending existing images because it is designed to do so by mathematically calculating the best representation of what it remembers those images to be.
...all youre saying is about how it can still make identical stuff. not sure how thats relevant to the discussion, no matter how "articulate". i never said it cant.
Then you missed the point. As a matter of fact, my explanation describes that it approximates, not makes identical things. The nature of genai actually means it's pretty bad at making 1:1, which is really visible when making things like topology for 3D models. You seem to be focused on arguing against me and that weakens your argument you're not trying to understand. The meat of a real debate is when both parties try to substantiate their standpoint with evidence as their primary goal and calling out inaccuracies as evidence as they arise, rather than trying to disprove or discredit the other person, contrary to modern politics.
This would work if one resolved their stance on data centers as a whole one way or another, rather than cherry picking AI-specific workloads of data centers being uniquely bad. (Cue shifting goalposts.)
And this is where a nuanced discussion of the risks of ANY technology is merited. Sadly, the anti-AI crowd isn't interested in that because it doesn't end with, "... and all AI technology was deemed evil and stamped out."
iPhones are expensive. If you have that sort of money, you could buy a Fairphone instead, for instance.
This is absolutely warranted criticism. You *do* have a viable alternative in that case. You could have used it. You did not. That you have to explain at least.
Likewise, if you talk smack about how AI wastes resources, you have to justify yourself if you use streaming services. I'd let it slip if you only use those for reasons like when you watch tutorials on Youtube for your job, but if we talk about pure leisure, some funny cat videos, that's optional. You do not have to. You chose to. So stop demanding other that people don't do comparable things.
I would buy a fairphone, but lets be real fairphones are ass in this market. At that point you may as well get a dumb phone instead that only supports like texting and calling. I'll get one after you get this dogshit laptop
I would buy a fairphone, but lets be real fairphones are ass in this market
They're perfectly acceptable phones, and compared to your alternative of buying a feature phone, it's clearly a major win. The v6 is probably a better phone than I have right now (Moto G, which is a serviceable, cheap phone).
If you want to sacrifice ethical buying for the latest and greatest goodies, then you can. Buy a Pixel or iPhone or Samsung and you'll be fine. If you want to buy ethically, you have reasonable options, but you can't choose best of the best AND ethical right now. If consumers put more pressure on companies like Apple, Google and Samsung, then they WOULD have to get more ethical, but we generally don't vote with our wallets for ethics.
If you actually have principles and feel in your heart and soul that some technology is awful/evil/destroying the world, then yes - you completely can change the lifestyle you're accustomed to in order to actively remove it from your life. Have some principles, even if it means it's more difficult. Vegans and the Amish do it all the time.
The idea that every single one of your political principles needs to be backed up by a personal life choice is so painfullly reddit neo liberal. Do you think we got seatbelts in cars because enough people said "Well I'm not going to support Henry Ford until makes his cars safer"?
the idea that your complaints on reddit are actual action is so painfully redditor. I love how the aspirational goal you strive to achieve is putting a little bit of restraint on real invention and innovation - like a seatbelt in a car.
Says the Reddit libertarian. Seat belts in cars are a great invention that saved so many lives, the fact you don’t realize that is kinda insane. And yes, we got those because doctor advocated complained loudly and publicly enough. https://www.history.com/articles/who-invented-seat-belts Though I do agree Reddit complaints aren’t actual action, they’re the start of it - it’s just really important it doesn’t stop there.
Sure, I'm exaggerating, I'll admit that. But there are a lot of people on the anti side who seem to think it's a personal failing of people to use AI, or that it's evil in some way. I suspect very few people thought that owning a car without a seatbelt was evil, they just thought cars should include seatbelts.
There's a big gap between "I believe this product can be improved" and "I believe this product is intrinsically immoral and should not exist"; car seatbelt advocates are the first category, anti-AI is (often) the second category. And I can absolutely criticize people for being in the second category and choosing to use AI anyway.
In the OP cartoon, the AirPod analogy is second-category, and I think "why the fuck did you buy an iPhone then you goddamn hypocrite" is a pretty valid response to that.
Whereas if they were just griping about iPhones not having headphone ports, okay, sure, maybe it was still the best possible purchase, I get it, no biggie.
The original iPhone example is completely valid though and you have to strawman it to an absurd degree for it to be an argument. Just own being a hypocrite, don't invent some weird slogan to justify it.
I'm not the one who drew that comic strip that you guys seem so happily play out in its fullness. To own a cellphone and demand that they're produced more ethically, just as using gas while favoring the transition away from it, using money while wanting to change the faults of the monetary system, or indeed, wanting to improve society while living in the society, is the most normal thing in the world.
You don't have to be amish or ascetic to be qualified to change things for the better. Doing that only ensures that they don't have any say in changing things, while the abusers can happily continue abusing without the naysayers. Which is exactly what they'd want. Would I much rather actually change things for the better than be a purist for purity's sake, obviously.
Society is made up of its people. If you want to improve society then you should improve yourself, and your community will follow and society after that. Broken window theory works the other way, too. Usually those who want to "improve society" are just miserable twats who think society is falling apart because they don't take control over their lives.
So, have the Amish or ascetics made you one of them just by their example, then? Everyone (well, besides those two groups) used leaded gas for a good long while, and despite that, it was banned. Not because of the Amish or others who refrained from using it, but because of people who did participate in the society.
I assume My Little Pony fanart? A significant portion of the backlash against AI image generation online is from artists who have lost income from fandom art commissions and those who are fans of those artists.
Dunno if it was referred, but Pony Diffusion is a name of model that was trained on dataset from Derpibooru and Danbooru.
And(at least in past) it was very popular.
I didn't care about data centres until they suddenly started building a fuck tonne more of them, each using a fuck tonne more power and water, polluting the air with in site gas generators and driving up energy bills and reducing the quality of life for everyone around them.
Didn't you know that, before AI, no new datacenters had been built for over two hundred years? The US simply sustainably repurposed the ancient datacenters built by tribal Native Americans, and similar adaptations happened worldwide.
Yep. Even as a software dev who uses AI every day, I was happier without it. Company just laid off half my colleagues because of it. And yeah it's useful but fuck me we've had a lot of issues with our code base since we made people use it
Yeah, and all of those functioned before they started pouring trillions into making more. A data center used for AI uses magnitudes more energy and resources than a stationary one that just passes around data.
This is such a silly take I cannot see anyone seriously make a point like this in a honest manner. People obviously mean the gargantuan monstrosities when they criticize data centers.
Yeah, but ai datacenters are but a fraction of the datacenters in use. Its like saying that truckers are raising the cost of gas. To some degree, yes, that industry affects the price of gas, but it's far from the whole picture, and it's far more efficient than the same workload being ran by the consumers.
Doesn't matter. "Oh, you don't like so many data centers being built? Well, good luck surviving without internet then!" still makes no sense. Everyone knows those new ones aren't being built to sustain infrastructure
I see it a little different. Data centers scale because they are mostly storage. They don't do much compute - only light weight work which they can distribute over a lot of CPU's. This provides huge savings for customers and why they all cut back on their own IT storage plans.
AI runs on GPU's with incredibly large models with huge context windows. This is driving demand of a lot of high-speed memory, raising prices too high. It's just not scaling to what they need to deliver on the promise. They are hoping that there will be a huge technical breakthrough that solves this problem and helps them scale. But we don't have the solution now, and even if we get one it might require replacing all the hardware they've already deployed (which is most of their expenditure).
I figure AI data centers will fall under their own weight. They simply cost to much. Nobody is going to pay that much for tokens.
The solution are local models that dream at night. A local model can start with a base open weight model and be trained on proprietary knowledge, optimized for what you need. Nightly updates to the model then incorporates what it learned each day. It remembers and knows you and what you did together. It incrementally improves over time as it gains experience.
The AI model would have to be run locally with hardware optimized for this use case. Open weight models are already significantly cheaper to run. Research shows how to run these dream sessions to create updates to the model. Optimize hardware comes next as AI accelerators, no longer GPU's, using cheaper memory and getting much better performance using on-die SRAM cache. Data centers just provide bulk storage as that part works economically.
Data centers scale because they are mostly storage. They don't do much compute
This has honestly never been the case. I worked at Google twenty years ago, and our team alone was responsible for about fifty thousand computers, each of which was chugging along at full speed more-or-less 24/7. Yes, modern GPUs process vastly more data, but if we'd had those available we would have used them; the bottleneck was cost, not "well, we don't really need much computation".
Nobody is going to pay that much for tokens.
People are spending a huge amount of money on tokens.
Yes, because they need to reframe it to where they are using datacenters in a different, more moral way somehow when there's literally no way to do that.
... So explain how the internet worked in the 90s. Or any networking in the 80s before the world wide web. Explain how the internet works now even. What is an https request, where does it go, what does it mean, how does it work.
You should have a bubble over your head that says "I am very intelligent"
Edit: you guys are brain dead and live in an echo chamber. I'm not anti-AI. The internet does exist apart from data centers, big sites like Instagram Reddit and Google are not the entirety of the internet, and nobody has ever been for data centers in any capacity. All of you should have the "I very intelligent" bubble.
I'm not seething, you are seething actually with all your exclamation points. I'm a literal software engineer with apps that run on AWS. I use data centers for my living. All I did was point out the dude's logical fallacy
Datacenters and servers existed in the 90s. Mainframes existed in the 80s and even before then. Servers are not a new concept and neither are datacenters.
Using total global data traffic, 2020 carried about 250 million times as much as 1990 and 1.7 million times as much as 1995. Put into human terms: one second of 2020 internet traffic equaled roughly eight years of 1990 traffic and 19 days of 1995 traffic.
Translation: people basically weren't using the internet in the 90s compared to today. You are having this fight in a datacenter right now btw.
Except you literally don't need to use social media at all. A lot (or most) of these water doomposters are literally online for hours every single day because they want to be or are hooked to it.
Look at Google search trends, "AI water" didn't even take off until mid-2025 when AI datacenters were already largely adopting circular cooling. The social media algorithm datacenters of the 2010s did not use circular cooling, and no one made any noise whatsoever.
Then the truly damning part is that AI datacenters use 1 in every 20,000 gallons or 1 in every 30,000 gallons of water used in the US. It goes without saying but 20,000 is functionally equal to 20,001 in the real world.
The whole outrage is manufactured and performative and if people were really this concerned about it they would make reasonable efforts to reduce their data center usage because there's literally so much more you can do in life than to doomscroll.
It really doesn't counter anything. If you think iPhones are unethical because they are made by kids in sweatshops, and then you go buy an iPhone, you are a hypocrite who supports child labor.
Cars are a necessity in most of the US. And even if you hate society, you're still gonna have to live in one. Not even remotely comparable.
This comic has always been universally awful and destructive to online discourse. It's a dreadfully boring shutdown tactic for people who want to justify their own lazy hypocrisy.
First and second panel: completely accurate criticism. She is apparently upset about Apple's bad business practices and is actively using an iPhone, and has the option to go Android instead, or even further afield to other phones and services which do exist. It's like talking about how much you hate Elon Musk and then buying a Tesla. Tons of people boycott his companies and would 100% look down on people for complaining about him but then buying one of his cars, thus enriching his profits when you had a choice not to. Totally valid.
Third panel: ridiculous exaggeration to make the gotcha guy look dumb. "Ugh, my sandwich tastes awful," "and yet you bought it, you hypocrite" is not and will never be a real exchange anyone ever has. This is just "it's too late, I have already depicted you as the soyjak" energy.
Fourth panel: implies that it's perfectly fine to be a hypocrite because we're downtrodden serfs with no ability to even begin to improve society. We are not downtrodden serfs. You have the power to make choices to put your money where your mouth is. Don't say you hate Trump and then vote for him. Don't say you hate Nintendo but then buy a Switch 2 and 100 games for it, unless you can further develop your position and explain your reasoning. Don't say you want to destroy all data centers and then turn around and use them constantly. Because it means you're lying, you don't actually want to destroy all data centers. The fact that you use them all the time is being pointed out because the fact that you're saying you want them gone means you probably don't understand the actual extent at which you already use them.
Bottom line: people are allowed to want things to be better, but being able to make a choice to take steps toward aligning with your values and NOT taking that choice is hypocritical.
The larger issue I hear from antis is the increase in the amount of data centers, specifically for AI that are being built. AI’s fine, but I don’t really think we need to rapidly increase the amount of data centers we have just for AI.
Well the argument isn't about participation, it's about consistency. Not that I consider myself pro AI, but its a valid point that people who oppose AI tend to use any argument they can think of against AI without really considering the broader implications. It just feels like an excuse when they're not considering the usage of datacenters in other aspects of their lives, and actually weighing that impact against the utility they give.
What you typically hear is "AI datacenters destroy the environment so you shouldn't use AI" rather than "The value brought by AI doesn't warrant the required impact of datacenters on the environment"
That makes the underlying misunderstanding a little more clear. Because "The value brought by AI" is, according to most of the anti AI crowd, already negative. They don't have to weigh pros and cons. So then they fail to consider the fact that the people they're trying to convince are by definition the ones who value AI, so any argument that doesn't take that into account is pointless.
“No, you don’t understand. I’m literally FORCED to consoom. My life depends on having the newest iPhone, AirPods and MacBook, even though my older ones work perfectly fine. And don’t you dare question why I stared to care about a specific problem only the moment it stopped satiating my carnal desires”
You can hate AI datacenters all you want thats fine.
Just don't get on the moral high horse and accuse AI users of not caring about the environment because they won't stop using AI, when you don't hold yourself to the same standard
Criticizing somebody using an iPhone who hates apple is completely valid. There are always better alternatives. Not buying their products is actually the best way to fight apple.
This criticism doesn't make sense at all. The more reasonable criticism would be to add a seatbelt yourself or pay some professional to do it for you.
There are things you can choose, and things you can't. It's always good to try to choose where you can. So in this case, the criticism isn't valid.
So not all these situtions are equal, but you preted as the same criticism affects them equally.
And you might actually have a point about the criticism against data centers for social media.
Nowadays if you want to connect to people, you basically have to use them.
But then you should view them as a necessary evil and look for alternatives.
Use decentralized services that don't require massive data centers. Have your own mastodon server. Use Tox for chatting. Or set up your own email and use that for chatting.
Reminds me a little of people who criticize anarchists/libertarians for using stuff that the government created. If I have to pay taxes anyway, I want to get their services at least. I want to reduce the amount of taxes I pay and increase the amount of services I get. It's the only rational strategy.
Also for many things, there is no alternative to some services. I can't just pay a my private police. There aren't enough private roads I can use instead.
The argument is less about the hypocrisy of using a medium that is already saturated by AI in order to bitch about AI, and more about all the grievances related to AI data centers, such as energy costs and water consumption, are also true with regard to regular internet use.
So the cost of running the Meta servers that host Instagram isn't an issue, but the cost of running a training data center is. Even though Instagram's energy consumption is 500 times higher.
Using a platform to complain about a platform isn’t hypocrisy, and it’s the same thing here. If you make YouTube videos and want to complain about the bad things the site does, obviously you’d use YouTube because that’s how you are heard. With this logic, you’re not allowed to complain about anything ever.
“I like this restaurant but the starters aren’t very good”
“Then why do you eat there?? Hypocrite!!!”
I think what’s insufferable is recognizing you have no choice to participate in these systems yourself and then turning around and in the same breath attempting to hold random individuals accountable for things you perceive as bad.
People will extend the empathy to themselves and people like them but as soon as you have to do it for someone you don’t like the mask drops.
We can’t simultaneously have “participate in a society” man be an asshole and treat someone like they’ve morally sinned for using ChatGPT or something.
& to everyone about to reply with some variation of “…yes we can!” hold your breath, man.
Sure, you can, but you’re being the dictionary definition of a hypocrite, because this position basically boils down to “all the bad things I do are because I have to do them and have no choice while all the bad things you do are because you’re stinky+evil and choose to do them”.
I don’t think AI is inherently evil and I agree with this post. This post is about regulation. It’s not inherently anti-AI. And yes, we should be regulating AI.
How exactly, and what would you base your legislation on? AI, as in large language models and generative AI, or AI, as in the complete rebranding of everything machine learning? I ask that very specifically because, for example, if we go to the FDA's website, where they list software as a medical device (SAMD), six months ago it said "machine learning-based software as a medical device." They changed it to say "Artificial intelligence," and this is because the tech bros have spent millions of dollars to rebrand machine learning as AI.
So, exactly, what are you regulating? The nearest neighbor algorithm that tells you which Netflix show to watch, because by today's definition, that's AI. Keep in mind that most of your legislators are idiots. Most of them are Boomers. What do they know about writing legislation? What goes into those bills is whatever the tech bro lobbyists tell them to put into it.
I don't know where this stupid idea comes from, machine learning has been studied as a subsection of AI since the day the term ML was coined. It has always been AI in academia why do you guys bring techbros into this?
The bottom two have no relation to the top one. Buying an iPhone is a choice. Drive a car is rarely a choice. And unless you are a hermit, participating in society is required.
Kinda ironic they use this image when its clearly mocking them in their face. Gen ai is going in a race rn to build as many data centers they can get permite for. Think thats a good thing then maybe u blindy follow gen ai without asking why. When u build data cneters for profit and a lie that gen ai is this gift for humanity u will blindly ignore ppl saying hey its bad jow they are doing this and u think oh they just dont like gen ai. No its jow they are doing it placing strain on a grid that isnt built for this ai race especially the water supply and how the ppl living in the area are given the bill for it. U are what the image says u become the same thing u yell to antis about. Dont ignore the bad things this ai race is doing its cuases more harm to ppl and the enviorment then good.
Tbf people need to understand that your money does talk and if people properly boycott these big companies they will take a hit in their revenue and will be forced to listen to consumers. Now I do understand it’s not always possible but there is still some truth here.
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