The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment

Re:The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment by lizknope on Sunday April 19, 2026 @10:18PM (#47829648)

Every PC gamer / hardware tech review forum is full of anti-AI hatred.

People want to buy a new GPU, add RAM, a new SSD, or hard drive. All of these have doubled or quadrupled in price in just a few months.

Then there are reddit threads every day where I think 30% of the original posts and comments are AI generated spam. If I see a post with emdashes or anything that ends by asking for "thoughts?" I just down vote and report as spam. I want to interact with actual humans not AI bots.

Then we see posts about AI data centers and electricity use which will lead to higher electric bills for ordinary people if demand is higher than supply.

This is ignoring all the stuff about people losing jobs.

So why should the video game playing population or even the general population be in support of AI? Of course it has uses but there are so many negatives right now it is easy for me to understand why people are already sick of it.

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Re:The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment by gruez on Sunday April 19, 2026 @10:49PM (#47829852)

>Then we see posts about AI data centers and electricity use which will lead to higher electric bills for ordinary people if demand is higher than supply.

That hasn't really played out in reality. The correlation between datacenter capacity growth and electricity price growth is poor.

https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20251101_USC...

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Re:The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment by frm88 on Monday April 20, 2026 @02:42AM (#47831075)

I think a more detailed look at data from 2024 to 2026 gives you a clearer picture than that graph from the economist. Electricity prices have risen more than 7% since lst year (EIA) https://www.consumerreports.org/data-centers/ai-data-centers...

Scroll down to get to the links to the data sites.

That same Bloomberg analysis found that areas with high concentrations of data centers saw electricity prices jump 267 percent over the past five years.

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Re:The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment by gruez on Monday April 20, 2026 @12:33PM (#47836706)

>That same Bloomberg analysis found that areas with high concentrations of data centers saw electricity prices jump 267 percent over the past five years.

If you click through to the bloomberg article, you'll find that the 267% figure is for wholesale prices, whereas the economist chart is for retail rates. Wholesale rates being up but retail rates staying the same or even dropping isn't contradictory, because retail rates contain other components which might drop with more datacenters. For instance having more datacenter usage means more of the transmission/distribution costs are borne more by datacenter users.

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Re:The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment by frm88 on Tuesday April 21, 2026 @12:59AM (#47844696)

Wholesale rates being up but retail rates staying the same or even dropping isn't contradictory, because retail rates contain other components which might drop with more datacenters

I will not bore you with the many links I could provide which state that retail prices have risen up to 7% (like I stated above). CNBC reported this: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/21/why-electricity-prices-are-s..., More-Perfect-Union made video on it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YN6BEUA4jNU, Invezz states the complete opposite to your argument: wholesale prices are relatively table since 2023, while retail prices 'skyrocket' (their term, not mine) https://invezz.com/news/2025/10/29/us-retail-power-prices-so....

I have no horse in this race, I'm in the EU, but the mechanisms by which the industries socialize costs is pretty universal and applies here as well.

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Re:The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment by heyalexhsu on Sunday April 19, 2026 @10:33PM (#47829732)

Because you can get Hollywood visual effects from Nvidia DLSS 5! /s

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Re:The Uncanny Valley and the Rising Power of Anti-AI Sentiment by tim333 on Monday April 20, 2026 @01:22PM (#47837576)

A lot of the problem is with the investment bubble aspect of AI rather than the tech itself. If people who wanted to use AI had to pay appropriate server costs the demand would be about ten times less and GPU, RAM and SSD prices no much changed. But instead you have Altman et all trying to burn vast amounts of investor cash to do a land grab.

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