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The communist twitter artists have good reason to be scared. Art jobs are already being impacted by AI. Living off art commissions might actually be straight up impossible in the near future if it isn't already. Standing firmly against a clear threat to your livelihood is reasonable. Generally, AI is hyped because of the promise that it will automate away most of our labor. If the opposition is fueled by fear that this is correct, then that actually explains the denial of AI capabilities quite well. Once you admit an LLM can do your job cheaper and with comparable results, then you are going to be replaced. Of course people oppose this with every tool in their arsenal. This results in bad faith arguments, but the basic standpoint still makes sense.
Regarding your point about property taxes, I agree there should be a point at which the company pays enough to offset local damages while also sharing some of the wealth it earns with the community in question. If there was some guarantee this would happen, I also imagine much of the anti-datacenter sentiment would die down wnough to allow for easy construction. The fact that it hasn't, shows that the builders of datacenters are not yet bidding high enough.
Yes, it's reasonable, in that I can articulate reasons for it. But the reasons are ludditism and anti-progress, this isn't hypoerbole, this is what the luddites preached and practiced. We ought want labor to be automated, this is how all progress has happened. We should also demand that some of these gains be redistributed to those replaced at first and the population in general in time. But once we can replace toil we ought to. Work is not an ends, it's a means to an ends. Demands to spend a third or more of your life doing labor to survive when a machine could do it instead is insanity. Work will not set us free.
The demand of the anti-datacenter group is not "bid higher" it is go away and die. The propose moratoriums, not taxes or standards. If all the demand was was that AI companies be taxed at some reasonable rate then I'd have absolutely no problem with the demands.
This is notably contrary to your initial statement calling them idiots and claimed there were no rational justification. From the perspective of self-preservation, then there clearly is a rational argument against AI. It will take your job and leave you with nothing.
"Fuck off" is a natural response when you don't believe the other side is going to offer anything reasonable. If they instead would enter into negotiations with a meaningful offer, the tune would probably change. If you are trying to get someone to do something for you (in this case let you set up datacenters) it is common sense that you should have a clear answer when they ask what is in it for them.
I called them barely sentient, not non-sentient. There is a vague and difficult to clean up cloud of noise behind the eyes that still marks them as among the living. The noise is basically ludditism in a pure form that they're too embarrassed to or historically illiterate to own.
We're not even talking about the perspective own talking to the perspective data center, we're talking about some third party declaring that the town should be disallowed by gunpoint from even negotiating.
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