Why do people fight so hard to be fencesitters? The video is about criticising H Green’s actions and teaching people to identify AI writing, but it seems like he just made the video to cash in on a trending topic. He therefore had to feign an opposition to AI, but couldn’t even do that.

Here’s a TL;DR if you don’t want to waste 3 minutes watching the intro of this:

• 1 He says there is “moral panic” about LLM usage
• 2 He says that being concerned about the water usage is hypocritical if you use any electronic device at all (citing in particular iPhone chargers, for some reason)

My responses to that would be

• 1

This is no moral panic - we are concerned with over-usage of this tool, because, like drugs, spending too much time doing it seems to drive people insane and reduce their critical thinking skills.

We can look at car, trains and planes as an “essential” technology - for travel - which we similarly wouldn’t want someone to over-use in any way, for pollution, congestion, and brain chemistry reasons. As well as wasting their time and not living the most authentic human experience they could do.

• 2

LLM datacenters are of a ridiculous scale. They can be as big as nuclear power plants

It is also less about “is it doing something bad to our water that other things are also doing,” its a response to a visible, active, existential threat to communities (e.g rural communities or poorer neighbourhoods where these data centers are placed)

Obviously we can criticise the new problem of Data centers without mentioning other technologies that might pollute water. I think Jones also misunderstands the criticism of LLMs regarding water, because he tried to relate it to “oh but every electronic device you use connects to the hydroelectric system.” - this doesn’t necessarily pollute the water, whereas something about datacenters pumping water in for cooling does