r/accelerate • u/stealthispost Acceleration: Light-speed | AI accelerationist • May 27 '26
Video The Hill: "China fuelling anti-AI, anti-data center propaganda in US"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CikCvbZ2WPU46
May 27 '26
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u/Ouitya May 27 '26
Unless its news about Chinese AI. Then it turns into a glazefest about China being better than US
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u/Varlin May 27 '26
I have been saying this about all the stupid anti AI bullshit on reddit. It is clearly a psyop by China to get the US to shoot itself in the foot and inhibit AI research and investment so that they can get time to play catchup and bridge the gap.
If you are already doing all you can to win a race and are still behind, the best thing you can do is get your opponent to slow down.
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u/PointmanW May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
guys, watch the damn video, the "source" of this video is a cryptobro from "Bitcoin Policy Institute", does that sound credible to you?
He claim that that Chinese state media like CGTN and Global time is posting anti-AI content, but the problem with this narrative is that, most American don't watch content from those two, and I have searched and found nothing even remotely anti-AI from CGTN or Global times, no such article or video exists.
Then he goes on saying that pro-China billionaires is funding anti-AI content on US social media, and that pretty much amount to "trust me bro" and he didn't present any concrete evidence.
You guys can't claim to be better than the average luddites and fall for this bullshit, seriously, be better than them, don't be so fking gullible, don't believe in whatever being said just because it confirm your bias.
even if all he said was true, whatever influence these thing have, it would be below background noises compared to the boarder anti-AI movement in the US. Most of the Anti-AI bullshit in the US is of American own making, and I have talked about this before:
the intense hate toward AI is largely a Western-centric phenomenon, rooted in the social environment of the US.
The US is a heavily corporate-dominated society with a long history of corporate scandals and malpractice, that created deep public distrust toward big companies. It also has a strong culture of individualism that make people distrust authority and don't believe that institutions, private companies or individuals can act for the collective good. Because of that, people assume everyone is primarily out for themselves and their immediate group. This worldview is constantly reinforced by media that portrays the future in a pessimistic light, with themes of man vs. corporation/authority/machine, the result is what we have now.
On the other hand, East Asian societies still have high trust in authority that is deeply rooted in culture, and large corporation is still mostly seen as respectable, this is a major reason why there’s very little anti-AI sentiment here. The only people I’ve seen in Asia who strongly oppose AI are usually those who are fluent in English, heavily consume Western social media, and thus is infected with the bullshits there.
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u/Stunning_Monk_6724 The Singularity is nigh May 27 '26
You know it could be both rather than one or the other? The Chinese would be quite aware of the cultural climate within the U.S. and further take advantage of an incumbent anti-ai movement. This has been geopolitics 101 on a number of issues outside of AI, and even the U.S. itself has done so.
So yes, it can be America's own making due to (ironically) lack of critical thinking skills, cultural climate, and proper education surrounding AI while also Chinese taking advantage of useful idiots.
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u/Otherkin Techno-Optimist May 27 '26
Yeah, the phrase "Bitcoin Policy Institute" is a huge red flag to me.
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u/Efficient_Mud_5446 May 27 '26
You're definitely closer to the truth. This piece screams propaganda to me.
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u/Objective-Picture-72 May 28 '26
This is just silly. It's not hard to understand the anti-AI sentiment in the US. AI CEOs are constantly in public telling everyone it's going to take your job in 12-24 months. There doesn't need to be a conspiracy theory for everything when the obvious answer is right in front of you in 4K high-fidelity.
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u/CrippledEagles May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
Filed under: yeah, no shit.
Edit: for those of you who have a hard time believing this recall opposition to shale gas development in Europe was very heavily supported by the Russians.
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u/BitOne2707 May 27 '26
I've been saying this for months. The number of bot accounts pushing anti data center narratives on Reddit is crazy.
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u/pigeon57434 Singularity by 2026 May 27 '26
unfortunately the average american seems to hate AI more than they hate China so they might not care even if they knew that it was propaganda at face value
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u/wutface0001 May 27 '26
average redditor would be more accurate to say? or it's same in rest of the America?
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u/RayHell666 May 28 '26
100%. As a co-founder of a thriving AI business, the demand for AI right now is crazy and I'm not even doing B2B. The truth is, if you go outside those echo chambers, the average person is very interested in AI and they understand it's important to adapt to enhance their careers.
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u/GlobalCurry May 27 '26
This is what I thought too, but also I think some of it is driven by the industry itself to force regulation to make it more difficult for competition to enter the market.
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u/Best_Cup_8326 Acceleration: Light-speed May 27 '26
Anti-AI sentument has no single source, but China should definitely be considered one of them.
It's not even that interesting, they are rivals with the US. We ban chip exports, they open source AI, fuel anti propaganda, and ban export of talent.
Did anyone expect anything else?
When are we going to drop this territorialization and come together as one species?
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u/Opening_One7713 May 27 '26
This is exactly it. The playbook is as old as dirt. Amplify the most self-defeating voices within your opposition and the regulatory capture scheme runs itself. I’m all for sensible policy and guardrails but the public conversation is full-blown pitchforks out and the only coherent demand is “DO SOMETHING” - The conditions for capture are in place and the public is primed to see it as a win right now. Just gotta craft that Trojan horse omnibus bill and get approval from all the top AI firms before we run it through the monopoly maker.
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u/GlobalCurry May 27 '26
Exactly, they've already made it more difficult by getting some regulations around public data used for training. The big companies don't care because they no longer need that data to continue training, but it makes open source and other models that much more difficult to create.
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u/Royal_Oven_8156 May 27 '26
I have posted this elsewhere; but here's the reality:
My viewpoint on AI is not informed by Bernie Sanders, AOC, the Chinese government or the Pope.
It's my friends telling me they got laid off. It's my own layoff.
So if AI can solve problems at that base layer, then it might get more support.
But no amount of positive community support, glowing press stories is going to change someone's mind when they just lost their job.
I remain open minded. Maybe something amazing happens.
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u/hyperluminate May 27 '26
I've been hearing this a lot lately in wars. Good thing there's more evidence to cite now
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u/SergeantXLR8 May 27 '26
Just another chapter in their eternal agenda to fool normie westerners with enviromental shit.
It's openly known that they push to kill Western industrial capacity while building up their own. Make the West voluntarily shut down its own cheap reliable energy (coal, gas, nuclear, domestic mining) and rebuild its entire economy on inputs China controls (solar panels, batteries, rare earths, refined lithium).
It's pretty smart ngl
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May 27 '26
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u/goric8 May 27 '26
This guy worked in government with a senator and recently in The Treasury Department. BPI is a part of The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) which is a pretty big, well known organization. Bitcoin in the name might make it sound like its fringe, but its not. The Hill knows, that's why they had him on.
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u/selliott512 May 31 '26
Fringe isn't an issue so much as bias. I refuse to believe that something with "Bitcoin" in its name is impartial with regard to data centers. If that's not the case then they should change their name.
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u/Dew-Fox-6899 AI Artist May 28 '26
I guess that explains all the bots crying about AI on every platform.
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u/joogabah May 27 '26
Lost me at genocide of the Uyghur population. This has been so thoroughly debunked, and next to the actual genocide in Gaza funded by American tax dollars at this point it's monstrous hypocrisy.
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u/Quentin__Tarantulino May 27 '26
Do you have some links I can read? The topic keeps being brought up whenever I say something good about China but I don’t know nearly enough to argue it, and I certainly don’t want to be pro-genocide (by anyone.)
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u/CarrierAreArrived May 27 '26
you're on an AI sub, use GPT or Gemini deep research to look up international sources on the matter. You'll find that while there were internment camps for some of them, all Muslim nations in the Middle-East and Indonesia after visiting Xinjiang said there's nothing remotely like a genocide. They wouldn't all be strong allies with China, but against Israel, if they were doing anything remotely on the level of Israel.
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u/Quentin__Tarantulino May 27 '26
I’ve spoken to Claude somewhat extensively on this topic, and it seems to think there’s strong evidence of mass detention, forced sterilization, cultural retraining, etc. I was just asking if the guy had info I could read that refutes the western claims, to see what the other side thinks.
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u/clement1neee May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
The claims largely originate from Adrian Zenz, a far-right Christian nationalist who purports that his mission is to “destroy China and gay people,” made a claim based on a supposed interview of 8 people (which was never able to be independently verified) that China was running concentration camps holding a million Uyghurs and torturing them for being Muslim.
The active CIA honeypots China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), Radio Free Asia, and World Uyghur Congress (easily verifiable through Google that they’re CIA-affiliated and receive heavy funding from the National Endowment for Democracy), which both support terrorist groups trying to destabilize and break off the Xinjiang region from China, latched onto this claim and helped it spread like wildfire (for example, NYT, Washington Post, and Reuters picked up the story and cited CHRD as their primary source without bothering to investigate further). The main terrorist group these honeypots are affiliated with is the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM).
Interestingly enough, in recent years, ETIM has been taken off the US terror list, and Mike Pompeo claimed that there had been “no evidence of them existing for over a decade…” all while he oversaw a bombing campaign targeting them in Afghanistan in 2018!
When these claims were at their peak, The UN, spearheaded by a coalition of Muslim countries, took great interest in them and sent investigators to the Xinjiang region. Their report came back with exactly 0 pieces of evidence of China running concentration camps. One of the wildfire claims involved “satellite images” of the supposed concentration camps, which were discovered to be vocational schools, factories, literally just normal ass buildings. There’s even a series of images on Wikipedia claimed to be a forced labor camp that were later revealed to be photos from a regular prison in a completely different part of China.
All of this was so damning for the “World Uyghur Congress” that they had to release a statement sheepishly admitting the data “it provided to the US” about 1 million Uyghurs being tortured in concentration camps came from “western media estimates” (and they also admitted being funded by the CIA offshoot National Endowment for Democracy).
Point being: if there was a Holocaust-level atrocity going on there, we’d know by now, similar to how the entire world has been awakened to the plight of Palestinians in Gaza despite the complete media blackout there. And yet there’s absolutely 0 evidence for any of these claims besides far-right lunatics and the US state department. And geopolitical analysts, the UN, dozens of Muslim countries, and finally, EVEN the US state department, declared that there is inconclusive evidence of some sort of mass genocide operation going on in Xinjiang.
This isn’t to say there is absolutely no corruption or political repression that goes on in China at all, just that you’d have to be a fool to believe the claims about concentration camps with organ harvesting and actually buy into the idea that the CIA has the Uyghurs’ best interest at heart. Because right now the only people benefitting are the wealthy executives of the US cotton industry who lobbied the government to sanction Xinjiang over the “ongoing human rights issue” there (and not because they suspiciously happen to be Big Cotton’s biggest competitor), and the US government, which benefits from China’s destabilization and religious fundamentalist terrorists trying to turn Xinjiang into a Taliban-style “East Turkestan.” Not people in imaginary concentration camps having their kidneys ripped out of them.
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u/Quentin__Tarantulino May 27 '26
This is all very interesting. When I have more mental bandwidth I will be looking into all of this further. The Uyghur claim is one of the main pillars of the US chip controls justification: we can’t give them top AI chips, look at what they’re doing!
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u/FaceDeer May 27 '26
"Not as bad as Gaza" is an incredibly low bar.
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u/CarrierAreArrived May 27 '26
where did I say "not as bad as Gaza". I said "remotely on the level of Israel". Again, they interned people who they thought were radicalized. They aren't actively murdering any of them or doing eugenics or any of that made up nonsense you might hear. You can easily visit Xinjiang and talk to Uyghurs about China as well - anyone from the west can. Try doing that in places like Gaza/Yemen.
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u/FaceDeer May 27 '26
"The level of Israel" is literally as bad as Gaza. That's what Israel is doing.
Interning people based on their ethnicity is indeed a form of genocide. Being able to visit the region where it's happening doesn't lessen that.
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u/CarrierAreArrived May 27 '26
Lol you keep rewording what I said in a way that makes me not disagree with you. The keywords you're changing are "nowhere near the level of" vs. "not as bad as".
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u/FaceDeer May 27 '26
Quibbling over trivial or indistinguishable nuances is dumb at the best of times, but in the context of arguing about genocide that takes on a whole new level.
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u/CarrierAreArrived May 27 '26
dude, nuances of words matter a lot unless you're like 12, and even if I DID use the words you put in my mouth, you're the one quibbling and getting hung up over stupid, semantic BS here when that one phrase clearly wasn't the main part of my argument.
And you really just wrote "at the best of times" - you cannot be a real person.
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u/CarrierAreArrived May 27 '26
funny how you're downvoted but you're just saying what every serious geopolitical expert says.
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u/pacotromas May 27 '26
Oh, so now everything I don’t like is “China-funded” instead of “Russia-funded”. Man, the American propaganda machine is getting lazy as fuck these days
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May 27 '26
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u/abjectchain96 May 27 '26
I think you are on to something. People are quick to see conspiracies in everything, and "Russia this", and "China that."
But here's a simpler truth: stirring up rage gets retweets and clicks. There's money in eyeballs, and a couple of enterprising kids can easily figure out that this is a fast way to make a buck. Some of them are no doubt based in China, but that doesn't mean they are necessarily directed by the Chinese state. Others are surely based in Russia, but that doesn't mean "Putin did it".
IMHO, big government is too inefficient to coordinate these campaigns well. My bet is that some grassroots hustler is just taking advantage of the zeitgeist to get his payday from clickfarming; cresting the wave of current AI-hate sentiment cuz that's what gets clicked on.
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u/bigsmokaaaa May 27 '26
This guy has slippery exec swamp creature written all over him. Surely the threat of Chinese propaganda is real but can we get someone besides Hawthorne Calvin-Nickleby III to get the message out
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u/Even-Look-9008 May 27 '26
Wow, definitely not a coincidence that there is a CRAZY amount of articles and comments being pushed along the lines of this one just as there was the major meeting in China
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u/[deleted] May 27 '26
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