This isn't about AI but about Ukraine. Aside from this being drastically off topic, it is worth articulating the many differences here. The AI companies are taking individual books and scanning so they have training data. They are making use of them. And they are doing so largely with older used books which would often be thrown out anyways. Used book stores throw out old books all the time, as do libraries. Moreover, the books being destroyed for digital scanning are often things which are not just that important, things like random sword-and-sorcery novels from 1975 and car manuals. This is in drastic contrast to the wide-scale deliberate destruction of books and book infrastructure by Russia; they are trying to destroy Ukrainian culture and the ability for children to get an education. In some cases, nearly entire print runs of a book or entire print runs have been destroyed by what Russia has done here. The situations aren't remotely comparable. So instead of making complaints about AI again, maybe show you actually care about books by making a donation as they've asked?

Yes, people are using AI to generate slop, and do things like generate kitten pictures. But there's a lot of extremely productive use. We have a lot of people using it for coding. We have mathematicians using them to prove long-standing open math problems. There are a lot of positive uses here also.

Noise is largely due to gas turbines or diesel generators running. That's again the sort of thing where reasonable regulation can help out. Some other noise claims are also just not plausible; there have been examples of noise complaints about completed data centers which hadn't been turned on yet for example. The heat claims are generally not plausible. If you take the claims seriously, they'd have to be generating far more energy than they are. Meanwhile, people don't object to large parking lots which are constantly taking in sunlight and converting to heat. I'm also not sure how they engage in "destruction of neighborhoods" any more than any other building project.

Not really. Heavy duty training involves intensive energy use. And one of the genuine problems with AI data centers is the electricity use can be very high or very low with minimal warning to the grid operators. This is part of why it pushes up electric costs. I'm not sure what evidence you have that any new data center now is being built for AI. Many of the data centers being objected to are small "Edge Data Centers" used primarily to reduce latency for video streaming, video games, and other activities which require low latency https://www.maysteel.com/why-maysteel/resources/blog/types-of-data-centers-how-do-you-choose-the-right-data-center.

So, first putting solar panels on is a step. It doesn't do everything, but it is a good step. It also has the nice advantage that if there's a serious bust in data centers, there will be already solar panels ready to be connected the other way for the grid. But you are also underestimating the effectiveness of solar panels, for a few reasons. First, almost no data center is used at 100% capacity. The solar panels keep producing even when server racks are getting little use. Second, data centers require corridors for humans to move, office spaces for humans who work there to stay, along with bathrooms and other needed things. Typically, actual server space takes up around 20-25% of the actual space. Now, that's not quite as good as it seems, since data centers are often 2 or 3 floors. But overall, the ratio is still better than you state.

But if you think that's not enough, then you can make it tighter. You can do things like require that their parking lots have solar panels too. Or you can even just require a specific percentage of their power be handled by solar, and then let them figure out the details, including attached solar arrays if needed. But these are all conversations we can have, and far more useful than just saying "No!" very loudly.

There's obviously a massive large-scale backlash here, and it is pretty bipartisan. Part of it is concern about water use (which is largely overblown) and part is concern about increases in electricity cost (which is much more reasonable). But it is clear that two related things are happening: 1) People are reacting this way to all data centers, whether or not they have anything to do with AI. 2) People are blocking data centers rather than trying to take reasonable steps to make them manageable with their concerns, like requiring that they have solar panels. There's room for compromise here, but we're not getting it.