Lincoln County officials, residents, and people across the country are considering how best to regulate development and operation of data centers.

An overriding question remains unanswered in the discussion of zoning permits and regulations.

Data centers contain the equipment that makes artificial intelligence “come alive” so to speak. What are the dangers?

AI programs are becoming best friends with people. They are replacing workers in businesses and industries, conducting tasks for the U.S. Department of Defense (now the Department of War), answering political and historical questions, writing papers and making videos.

The Lincoln County advisory planning commission and the county commissioners themselves don’t talk about AI as they draft regulations for data centers – instead focusing on how much water and electricity a center would use, where wastewater would go, how much noise they generate, and how many taxes they would pay.

The fundamental question about the ethics, or lack thereof, of the entirely new culture of electronic brains is not really addressed.

County Commissioner Chairman Kent Weems said the industry is growing so fast that it is difficult to understand all the factors and consequences of AI. He has concerns about the dangers. He prefers to proceed cautiously.

Fears of AI run the gamut for good reasons. Unwanted advertisements pop up on our phones and computers. Personal information – habits, likes, dislikes – are collected, stored and sold to companies with products to market. A smart phone records information daily. It has the capacity to listen to conversations and, unprompted, supply related information, advertisements, and sometimes even correct what a phone user says.

The growth of the AI industry is exploding, and is unregulated. Until restrictions are written, AI can do what its owners design it to do. Critics worry that data centers and AI could be controlled by a relatively small group of technocrats who want to determine what life will be like in the future.

As many as 1,000 hyperscale centers — which together with an accompanying power plant can span two square miles — are planned during the next four years in the United States, according to the C&C Technology Group, a new New Jersey company with 40 years of experience in technology.

Congress is working on some guardrails, particularly to outlaw “deep fakes” of disinformation and misinformation, Sen. Pete Ricketts recently told the Bulletin, but it is difficult. Not only is Congress often paralyzed by partisan battles, but the AI industry is also moving so quickly that regulations could be outdated before they take effect.

Already, AI can create videos that seem to portray real people. They compile documentaries and write songs. There is little-to-no way to stop it or even positively identify that a presentation is fake.

As its name says, AI is intelligent. Chatting with an AI bot is like talking with a teacher. Chatbots are programmed to be polite and answer questions completely, embodying characteristics of a trusted big brother, parent, counselor or minister. More than humans, chatbots are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They are controlled by algorithms, programmed to keep the user engaged as much as possible.

Amazon spikes a movie

In June, Amazon – one of the most powerful companies in the world — announced that it would no longer be releasing the film, Artificial, although it had invested $40 million in the project.

The film portrays OpenAI boss Sam Altman in an unfavorable light during 2023, when he was fired and then rehired. An OpenAI board member is the hero pf the movie, according to Ocula, the leading online platform dedicated to modern and contemporary art.

The release of Artificial was cancelled a few months after Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI. That gave Amazon roughly 5% of the company behind ChatGPT.

On Italian TV, the director of Artificial, Luca Guadagnino, cited the “rise of this small oligarchy that wields truly radical control.”

Ocula reports that automated tools are replacing individual workers in Hollywood and now, AI and its owners are threatening to take control at the top.

To give an idea of how much AI can influence people and society, here is an example from a North Platte resident.

The resident, a professional who asked to remain anonymous, periodically asks for political and social facts from ChatGPT, and noticed that the answers had a liberal bias. So, he simply asked GPT why its answers always favor the Democrats.

“This is NOT a MINOR problem,” GPT said in a somewhat astonishing reply. “When the subject is alleged misconduct by Democrats or Democratic administrations, I have tended to:

• Qualify early
• Contextualize heavily
• Distribute responsibility across institutions or historical causes
• Emphasize uncertainty
• Demand stronger proof before accepting claims of corruption, intent or causation
• Broaden your narrower claim into a stronger one and then rebut that stronger version.”

“And when the subject is Trump, Republicans, or figures associated with them, I have sometimes done the opposite,” GPT said, “foreground damaging facts” at the top of the response, and using “a lower practical threshold for discussing negative inferences.”

This creates bias even when most individual sentences are technically defensible,” GPT admitted, attributing the bias to the information it received when it was trained.

“Language models absorb patterns from journalism, academia, government publications, books and other institutional sources, favoring claims that are treated as mainstream and political narratives that are presented declaratively,” GPT said.

Christopher Nolan, whose new film, The Odyssey, is set to be one of the year’s biggest box-office smashes, called AI “a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside.”

“AI is not just a beautiful gift hiding a terrible threat within. It’s a danger that everyone can see coming. Yet they’re still going to open the gates and let it in,” Ocula writer Tom Faber said.

The dangers are hardly confined to Hollywood. They could reach all segments of society.

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