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A powerful voice has joined the chorus of folks protesting the environmental damage wrought by American tech’s increasingly fervent, creepy-cultish insistence that you just have to use AI: Singer and songwriter SZA. This is per Rolling Stone, which has catalogued a number of comments—some removed, some not—that the SOS singer has made in recent weeks on Instagram about the environmental costs of artificial intelligence, noting that “AI doesn’t give a fuck if you live or die I promise” and calling out the ways the environmental damage the technology produces falls disproportionately on lower-class and minority communities. “PLEASE JUST GOOGLE ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM” she wrote in one such post.
SZA puts at least some of her focus specifically on Memphis, Tennessee, which is home to about 630,000 people, and also xAI’s Colossus data center, which is working hard to try to out-do that human population in terms of how large a carbon footprint it can produce. (According to the Southern Environmental Law Center, Colossus uses energy equivalent to 100,000 homes, and consumes 1.5 million gallons of water a day; groups in Memphis are currently targeting the facility for adding additional gas-powered turbines it reportedly hasn’t been cleared to use, and which will spew their runoff in the neighborhoods of many of the city’s poorest residents.) “Ai is killing and polluting black and brown cities,” SZA wrote in one post on social media. “None of you care cause your codependent on a machine. Have a great life.” Elsewhere, she wrote, “Please google how much energy and pollution it takes to run Ai .. please google the beautiful black cities like Memphis that are SUFFERING because of twitters new Ai system.”
Anyway: In other news, Elon Musk rolled out another one of xAI’s anime-coded “companions” for people to, we’re assuming, masturbate to today; he claimed that the new “companion” had a “personality” “inspired by Edward Cullen from Twilight and Christian Grey from 50 Shades,” and, Christ, if we’re going to burn down the entire planet and poison all our lungs for this idiocy, we at least wish it was being peddled by someone who understood that those characters are already essentially the same guy. Ugh.
