Like much of Facebook nowadays, the “California Life” Fb web page is stuffed with AI slop. There are generated photographs of highway patrol officers holding up a groundhog and lengthy road signs detailing California quirks.
And in between these are posts that admonish AI knowledge facilities.
“It’s not price giving up an inch of this for a knowledge heart,” reads one image, during which the phrases look carved right into a subject of crops.
“Not a single sq. inch of California is price giving up for an AI Knowledge Middle,” reads another posted the very subsequent day, the textual content floating above a generated picture of the California coast, the state flag within the foreground.
A third post reveals that very same textual content scrawled within the California sand, a crowd of protesters holding up indicators like “Clear Air Not Sever Air.”
It’s not simply California slop pages talking out towards knowledge facilities. Comparable posts—many with equivalent wording, and comparable imagery—seem on pages for a number of different states.
The format of the phrase carved right into a crop subject has additionally been posted on pages for South Dakota and Utah (and certain extra).
A few of the feedback on these posts are fast to name out the irony of utilizing AI to make anti-AI knowledge heart content material.
On the identical time, some don’t see the priority.
”So what?” one remark reads. “If he can try this now, doesn’t that show the purpose that MORE Ai facilities are NOT wanted?!” (How doubtless that these feedback are AI is unclear, although actual people do seem to frequently interact with Fb’s flood of AI photographs.)
The posts are even drawing consideration exterior of Fb.
“‘The masters instruments can’t dismantle the grasp’s home’ applies to AI slop that’s anti-AI or anti-data heart. Simply draw it in mspaint it’s going to be higher,” one user wrote on Buesky, referencing Audre Lorde’s 1979 essay about how systemic change can’t be achieved by the identical patriarchal, racist frameworks that led to the oppression within the first place.
Over on X, one person this week acquired thousands of likes after mentioning that “bot farms have discovered that anti-data heart posts on FB are good for engagement.”
Manufacturing unit farming
The posts doubtless aren’t meant to really be a instrument towards the encroaching takeover of AI and its knowledge facilities. Content material farmers, which have lengthy dominated sure corners of Fb, continuously submit about something that may get engagement.
However the truth that engagement seekers have zeroed in on the information heart debate is notable. Even when the intent isn’t real, the exercise means that there are numerous likes and feedback to generate across the subject.
And that’s as a result of the anti-data heart sentiment is actual, and rising.
From Alabama to Wisconsin to Utah, residents are pushing again towards the information heart increase, protesting particular tasks proposed of their areas.
In some cases, that backlash is working: Eight municipalities in Georgia have handed moratoriums on knowledge heart growth. Builders have withdrawn functions after native opposition.
Between late March by June of 2025 alone, an estimated $98 billion in knowledge heart tasks have been blocked or delayed, in accordance with Data Center Watch.
Knowledge facilities: Much less fashionable than nuclear energy?
Final 12 months, Change.org noticed a surge of petitions towards knowledge heart tasks: There have been a minimum of 113 petitions totaling round 50,000 signatures in 2025, in comparison with only one such petition relating to a knowledge heart in 2024, Quick Firm previously reported.
And that opposition isn’t slowing down. A latest Gallup poll from Could 13 discovered that seven in 10 Individuals oppose establishing AI knowledge facilities of their areas; 48% of Individuals are “strongly opposed.”
With 71% of Individuals opposing knowledge facilities, that opposition is bigger than what Gallup noticed towards nuclear power vegetation, which noticed a peak opposition of 63% because it started asking about nuclear vegetation in 2001.
Residents towards knowledge facilities fear about their useful resource use, for each water and power, in addition to noise, water, and air air pollution. They usually fear about financial penalties like larger utility payments.
These in favor of information facilities (27% of Individuals) largely cite financial advantages like job creation—although stories have discovered these tasks result in far fewer full-time positions than promised (and for various roles than the expert IT jobs anticipated).
This sentiment, then, is clearly bleeding into the processes that create this AI slop. Knowledge heart opposition is on-line within the first place, which makes it fodder for AI, and it’s prevalent sufficient on-line that these AI pages will submit about it time and again. AI is already mirroring our personal dislike of it proper again to us.
