Investigators recovered two stolen trailers carrying $1.3 million in data center supplies, including copper wire and infrastructure equipment.
Investigators recovered two stolen trailers carrying $1.3 million in data center supplies, including copper wire and infrastructure equipment.
It’s fascinating how selective people’s moral principles become.
When it’s AI data centers being robbed, suddenly theft is funny, justified, or even worth celebrating. But if the victims were socialist politicians, transgender people, or any other group this community sympathizes with, the reaction would be outrage and demands for justice.
For the record, I have no issue with people supporting socialism or transgender rights. I only use those examples because they’re emotionally charged topics in this community, and they illustrate how quickly people’s standards change depending on who the victim is.
Either theft is wrong regardless of who the victim is, or your moral standard changes depending on whether you like the target. That’s not a principle. It’s favoritism dressed up as ethics.
LLMs are built on theft of intellectual property and copyrighted products by capital managers who hoard wealth propped up on stolen wages and exploitation, look in the mirror before you yap on about selective application of morals.
So absolutely none of that has anything to do with people stealing copper from AI data center construction sites.
You can do all the moral finger-pointing you want. The moment you start selectively deciding who is and isn’t a thief is the moment the justice system starts breaking down. You don’t get to decide who can and cannot commit crimes. We already have enough of that in our American political system, considering who our president is.
To address your other point, no copyright infringement has been found to have occurred in the training of flagship AI models. If you’d like to debate that, that’s fine, but I don’t really feel like arguing about it because we’re talking about the morality of theft, which you apparently view as something that exists on a selective gradient. Good for you, sir. Go play Robin Hood in your own neighborhood.
Wealth inequality is one of the worst and most pressing issues in the world today. There is nothing I consider more damaging than the growing wealth gap, especially in America. You’re absolutely right about that. But once again, it has absolutely nothing to do with construction materials being stolen from AI data center construction sites.
Doesn’t it though? If there weren’t such rampant wealth inequality perhaps people wouldn’t be so inclined towards a life of crime. It has at least a little bit to do with it.
All right. I’ll concede that point. If there wasn’t such a massive wealth Gap. People wouldn’t have to steal like this. In this particular case you are right and they stand corrected.
It broke down long ago. You care more about copper in a techbro’s plagiarism machine than you do about all the wage theft ever.
No.
You’re stating a position that I never took. I never said I supported AI data centers. My point was about how users on Lemmy are quick to encourage criminal behavior when it targets something they dislike, while condemning the same behavior when it is directed at something they support. That’s called being two-faced.
For the record, I do not support AI data centers. They could all burn down for all I care. If every LLM shut down tomorrow, nothing in my life would change. I consider AI data centers a blight on the environment, and many communities do not want them built in their areas.
I pray to the God I don’t believe in that they don’t build one anywhere near me.
You just handwring about theft from them. But not wage theft.
For one reason.
No. I was talking about the two faced nature of this platform.
I’ve admonished data centers the entire time in this exchange. Don’t tell me what I wrote about. I know what I wrote about.
Wage theft impacts millions of actual humans and you’re whining about the rights you think a corporate owned tool of oppression has instead.
You actually read what I said?
You don’t think AI eliminating vast swaths of jobs and exasperating the wealth inequality that’s starving the economy has anything to do with an increase in poor and desperate people willing to resort to crime to surive? You do realise that data centers and AI are directly dependent, yes? That conclusion is just burying your head in the sand. Let’s not forget who started the moral finger wagging here, pointing to one crime while blinding themselves to another for whatever the irrational reasoning is. Like this particular crime is just happening in a vacuum, and AI isn’t infiltrating every aspect of society by design. What’s it like to be that selective?
“no copyright infringement has been found to have occurred in the training of flagship AI models” I’m just not going to engage with this level of disingenuous assertion, you’re either deluded or you’re a liar.
Okay, I’ll address this briefly.
When a human artist paints a painting and sells it, does the estate of Michelangelo receive royalties because that artist was inspired by his work?
The reason you believe LLM training is copyright infringement is that you fundamentally misunderstand how the technology works. That’s a common theme on this platform among people who oppose AI. Many dislike it because it’s become the popular position, not because they understand how these models actually function.
When an AI generates something, it creates a novel output in response to a prompt. It is producing something new, not copying existing works verbatim. Copyright infringement generally requires copying protected expression, and simply learning patterns from publicly available data is not the same thing.
Moreover, you can’t have it both ways. If information is publicly available, then it is available to be read, analyzed, and learned from. Either it’s public, or it isn’t.
More importantly, none of this was the point of my original comment. I’m only addressing it because you clearly want to discuss AI.
For the record, I am completely opposed to what many companies are doing with AI data centers. I think the current trajectory is environmentally damaging, economically questionable, and, in some cases, a humanitarian concern. I’ve said this repeatedly. You’re free to believe me or not, I can’t prove my sincerity, but that has been my position throughout.
Now, would you like to discuss the actual topic of conversation, the two-faced nature of Lemmy?
You couldn’t pay me enough to waste my brain cells on your disingenuous, fart-sniffing sophistry and bad faith horseshit, so no I don’t think I will, get better please.
So basically there’s nothing you can do to refute what I’m saying because it’s all true so you resort to “nuh-uh” with a thesaurus.
Isn’t this exactly what a jury of your peers is intended for? So people - the members of the affected community - can decide who is and isn’t a thief, after ensuring they’re provided with all the facts of the case?
No that’s not how that works at all.
At all.
And if that’s what you think or believe, I highly recommend you go back to remedial social studies class and ask a lot of questions.
Who the victim is, is part of what makes it wrong or not. A parent shoplifting baby formula is less wrong than a parent stealing formula from another parent. A dude stealing formula to scalp is worse than the first two. A dude stealing formula from a parent is the worst.
It’s really simple math.
There certainly are different levels of criminal severity, and you’ve outlined that perfectly. But it has absolutely nothing to do with this because they’re still stealing from someone. The people who prosecute and sentence the thieves can take those circumstances into account when determining an appropriate punishment.
Furthermore, you’ve failed to take your own example to its logical conclusion. The reason people are stealing baby formula in the first place is because it’s too expensive. In fact, everything is becoming too expensive. That’s a much broader and more serious societal issue than the act of stealing formula itself.
It’s not about criminality. It’s comparative morality.
You’re the first person to actually provide a constructive response to my comment. Thank you.
But we can definitely examine the comparative morality here. Let’s take a moment to consider who the victims actually are when large amounts of materials are stolen, regardless of where that theft occurs.
The first affected party is obviously the entity that owns the property, in this case the corporation building the data center. We can acknowledge that many people have little sympathy for a massive corporation losing money, and I understand that perspective. However, I still maintain that theft is theft regardless of who the victim is.
But what about everyone else affected by that theft? What about the construction workers who cannot work because projects are delayed? What about the construction companies that are contracted to complete the work and now have additional costs because of someone else’s actions? Why should those people bear the consequences of someone else’s crime?
And what about the thieves themselves? Are we automatically assuming they are morally justified individuals who are taking from the wealthy and redistributing it to those in need? That is not what is happening. These materials are being stolen and sold for personal profit through illegal channels. The people committing the theft are not acting out of some noble principle. They are benefiting themselves at someone else’s expense.
So who exactly are we supporting, and who are we condemning? I do not see any meaningful moral high ground in celebrating theft simply because the victim is a corporation. The entire chain of events, from the theft itself to the people harmed by the consequences, is far more complicated than “rich company loses money, therefore it is good.”
The most frustrating part is that this larger picture is often ignored. People focus only on the corporation taking a financial hit while overlooking everyone else affected by the crime. That is a very short-sighted and incomplete way to evaluate the situation.
The kind of selective reasoning that would bring the phrase “You shouldn’t blow up the death Star! He’s your dad!”
What? All you did cherry pick a super out of context quote and then say the death star is my dad?
Reading your comment was like looking at those first generation llm picture renders where your brain can’t quite make out what it is so it starts hurting.
??? You don’t know the plot of Starwars???
… Yeah, and AI datacenters being built speculatively is the same resource hoarding bullshit as high formula pricing.
Also idgaf about laws and crime, I said better and worse, right and wrong. That has nothing to do with legal, because if it did we wouldn’t be having these discussions about formula or datacenters, those kind of wealth abuses would actually be illegal.
I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about at this point sorry.
AI data centers aren’t people and are owned by corporations. The trans people and socialist politicians you hate don’t waste obscene amounts of electricity and water. The trans people and socialist politicians you hate don’t store data for surveillance capitalism. Trans people and socialist politicians aren’t a plagiarism machine. Trans people and socialist politicians don’t pollute everything with soulless slop.
One is a tool of oppression. The other is the people being oppressed.
I knew there would be at least one of you.
There’s a lot that can be debated about the validity, usefulness, and impact of AI data centers or data centers in general. However, I’m not going to get into that discussion with you because it would be a waste of time when you clearly didn’t read or understand what I actually wrote.
You saw the words “transgender” and “socialism” and immediately assumed I was attacking those groups, which was not the argument I was making. I don’t hate either of them. Those were examples of emotionally charged topics, not the subject of my criticism.
I explained how the data centers differ from the actual human beings you pretend that you don’t hate.
You are, once again, insinuating that I hate these groups simply because I used them as examples, even though I specifically said that I fully support them.
I wasn’t using those examples in a political context. I’m not comparing transgender people or socialists to data centers. I’m pointing out what I see as the two-faced nature of this platform.
The very same people who advocate for social welfare programs will, in the next breath, cheer on theft from AI data center construction sites.
Do you genuinely not see the hypocrisy I’m pointing out, or are you so focused on the political buzzwords that you’re missing the context of my argument?
Theft is wrong when you’re taking something away from someone who will miss it. Multi-billion dollar corporations will barely notice if their shit gets stolen, so I don’t care if it does.
I’m not asking you to care. What I’m saying is that you’re morally inept by not caring. Either you admonish theft across the board or you don’t. People are stealing from someone else regardless of who they are.
You don’t have to care, you’re just wrong.
I’m okay with not meeting your strict black and white standard of morality. In fact, I find it immoral. “You stole bread because you were starving?? You’re EVIL!!”
We’re not talking about people stealing bread because they’re hungry. We’re talking about people stealing millions of dollars worth of construction materials for personal gain.
Do you really think the thieves stealing those materials from AI data centers are morally justified by their actions?
I’ll even go one step further and fully admit that I don’t have a simple defense for someone stealing food because they’re starving. That situation is morally complicated and can absolutely be debated from a philosophical perspective. But justice is blind for a reason. We can acknowledge the circumstances behind a crime, show compassion toward the person committing it, and still recognize that the act itself is theft.
I’m not sure we can apply that same reasoning to organized theft of millions of dollars in construction materials.
Also, you’re the third person to tell me I’m being “black and white” about this. That criticism doesn’t really apply. I have consistently said that justice exists on a gradient and that different crimes carry different levels of severity. Recognizing that all theft is wrong does not mean I believe all theft deserves identical punishment.
Please don’t argue against a position I haven’t taken.
The reason I used a “stealing because they’re starving” example is that you said there are NO exceptions to the idea that all theft is wrong. I strongly disagree, and further think such inflexible thinking is destructive. While you have said that the punishment should be different depending on the crime, something being a crime is in itself not a reason to believe it’s morally wrong; there are unjust laws everywhere.
You sound well-spoken, yet you’re doing what everyone else is doing. You’re encouraging a set of circumstances that somehow negates the fact that it’s theft.
A starving man stealing bread so he doesn’t starve to death is still committing theft. By the very definition of the word, it is theft. Theft is, in itself, a form of wrongdoing.
Again, I fully agree that we can justify it morally under certain circumstances.
What I don’t understand is where the disconnect is. Do you genuinely disagree that it’s theft?
No, it is breaking a law, which is not necessarily wrongdoing. As I said, there are many unjust laws. Laws are not the arbiter of morality.
Since you said it can be justified morally under certain circumstances, but still consider it wrongdoing, this might just be a case of semantics. Something that is morally justified cannot also be considering wrongdoing to me.
So yes, it is theft. That alone doesn’t tell me whether or not it’s wrong. In this specific case, the data center thefts, I agree it is wrong of them to take items that are not theirs for the purpose of profiting from them. However, they are committing theft against something that itself constantly commits far greater theft by its very nature, not to mention great harm to the economy and environment. So it’s bad things happening to bad people, which I am not going to object to like I would if it happened to someone innocent. There are degrees of wrongness.
I think we’re using the word “wrongdoing” differently.
Theft is the intentional taking of someone else’s property without permission. That is, by definition, a violation of their property rights. In that sense, it is a wrongdoing. Whether that wrongdoing is justified is a separate moral question.
A starving person stealing bread is still committing theft. I may conclude that it is morally justified because preserving a human life outweighs the owner’s property rights. That doesn’t magically transform the act into “not wrongdoing.” It means one wrongdoing is excused by a greater moral obligation.
If we say a morally justified theft is no longer wrongdoing, then we’ve collapsed the distinction between describing an act and evaluating it. Every action we personally approve of would cease to be wrongdoing by definition, which makes the term lose much of its usefulness.
So I agree that context matters. I agree that there are degrees of moral culpability. But justification doesn’t change what the act is. It changes how we judge the person who committed it.
Not a fan of Robin Hood, then?
One of my favorite movies is Robin Hood Men in tights.
It’s like the old airplane movies every time you watch it, you find a new joke.
Theft is too vague to be given a blanket right/wrong verdict for all situations.
Failure to recognise nuance is morally inept.
We have courts and juries specifically because morality is not a hard rule.
This particular tack definitely seems to be the main flavor of responses to my comment at this point.
It is a really strange logical conclusion that many of you have arrived at.
What it sounds like you’re saying is that if the theft is morally correct, then it is somehow no longer theft and is perfectly justified. That is a very strange argument to make in the first place.
That is not how morality works. That is not how anything works.
If a starving person steals bread, they may have a morally compelling justification for their actions. We can debate whether that theft was ethically permissible under those circumstances. But they still committed theft. The act itself does not magically stop being theft because we understand or sympathize with the reason behind it.
The distinction between whether an action is understandable, justified, or morally excusable has been debated since the time of the Greeks.
I’m not sure how you came to that interpretation.
Theft is theft, I never implied it wasn’t.
And I never said it could be perfectly justified. I said each situation was nuanced and that there is no hard right/wrong.
That doesn’t mean the theft never happened, just that some crimes are easier to forgive.
Look, as long as we both agree that theft is, by definition, a crime, which it is, then we’re on the same page.
My point was that the way some people are talking makes it sound as though theft sometimes isn’t a crime or isn’t morally reprehensible.
I fully agree that wrongdoing exists on a spectrum and that different offenses carry different moral weight.
That has never been the point of contention.
What? By that definition nothing is theft unless ruled such by a court. Which funnily also means that if someone takes anything but doesn’t get caught, they haven’t committed theft?
Ergo any corporation powerful enough cannot commit any crimes, due to not being sentenced.
That’s bullshit and you know it.
This isn’t about if the guys stealing the copper committed a crime or not. Obviously they removed property without consent, which is theft.
However, is there such thing as “good” crime? Yes. Same as the mother stealing formula for her baby, or the homeless person stealing bread, or these guys stealing copper from AI data centres.
I have no idea how you came to this conclusion.
No, what people are saying is that not all theft is wrong. It depends on the circumstances. Is that really so hard to comprehend?
Okay. Something being wrong or correct isn’t the same as the thing justified.
What the heck are you on about? You can absolutely have a consistent moral framework that destroys data centers while protecting individuals. Hell, call it humanist or something.
Sure, you absolutely can. That’s not in contention. I am simply admonishing how two faced Lemmy is.
How can you “admonish Lemmy”? Accusing individuals of hypocrisy or being two-faced would require you to understand the moral framework they’re coming from. A lot of them probably have something similar to what I described.
The people in this comment thread are encouraging more theft at data centers.
I have a pretty solid grasp of there moral framework.
I’m saying you don’t have to be two-faced or hypocritical to encourage theft from or destruction of data centers.
Correct you don’t. And yet people are. Which was the point of my original comment.
Oh I didn’t see anything like that. Must be from people I’ve already blocked.
The difference is that the data centers aren’t part of the community. They’re invasive, coming in to steal the water and power and spoil the area with heat and noise. The locals have no say or control over them.
Turning a blind eye towards damage done to them is a form of self defense.
I’m sorry, are you talking about me?
Because I never said I supported data centers. I was simply pointing out what I see as the two-faced nature of this community. In this thread, many Lemmy users are openly cheering on thieves stealing supplies from AI data center construction sites, yet those same people will turn around and condemn someone for not sharing their opinions on other issues.
Multiple people have already made assumptions about my beliefs, put words in my mouth, and assigned positions to me that I never argued for in the first place.
And that is another issue I see frequently on Lemmy: people arguing against a position they invented rather than the one someone actually stated.
For example, it often goes something like this:
“You don’t like AI data centers, so you must be some kind of left-wing communist. Why don’t you go eat avocado toast while listening to lo-fi music?”
Except none of that follows from what was actually said. Disagreeing with one thing does not automatically place someone into a political category.
Amazing that your ‘gotcha’ is just two false statements.
Theft isn’t wrong regardless of the victim - it’s nuanced, just like all crime. That’s why we have very complicated legal processes to determine guilt and appropriate punishments.
Our morals don’t change depending on whether we like the target - it’s that our judgments are based on context.
The cool thing about ethics, morals, principles, etc… They’re all made up. We invented them. They have no objectivity (as far as we know) and therefore can and have changed based on our feelings. “Ethics” is just humans agreeing to do things a certain way because it makes us feel good, or doing things the other way makes us feel bad. There is no objective truth to it that you can so easily plug in a problem and get an objective answer.
Or is the world you want to live in just completely binary? No room for nuance?
Wow. That is a lot of words for someone to say they have no clue what they are talking about.
Why is Lemmy like this?
There is no established consensus that subjective morality is correct over objective morality, or vice versa. Both are philosophical positions that have been debated for centuries. Acting as though one side has already been proven correct is not an argument.
The point remains simple: stealing property that does not belong to you is wrong. It does not matter whether the owner is a person, a corporation, a political group, or an organization you dislike. The act itself does not magically become moral because you disagree with the person who owns the property.
The same applies to murder. Killing someone does not stop being murder because the person is considered immoral. If I killed Adolf Hitler before his crimes were committed, it would still be murder unless there was a legitimate justification for doing so. The morality of an action cannot be determined solely by how much we dislike the target.
Are there circumstances where people may feel justified stealing materials from AI data center construction sites? Maybe. Context matters. What does not change is that the law recognizes it as theft, and theft has traditionally been considered immoral because it involves taking something that belongs to someone else through force, coercion, or deception.
The criminal justice system already accounts for circumstances. It recognizes different levels of severity, intent, and harm. That has never been the argument.
The issue is the blatant inconsistency I see on this platform. Some actions are condemned as immoral when they happen to people or organizations that the community supports, while those same actions are suddenly justified when the target is politically unpopular.
You do not get to have a moral framework that changes depending on who benefits from the outcome. If theft is wrong, it is wrong regardless of whether the victim is someone you like or someone you dislike.
There is a reason Lady Justice is blindfolded while holding a balance. Justice is supposed to be applied equally, not based on personal preference, ideology, or who people think deserves it.
I do, though, is the thing. As does all of society. We always have and we always will. And you’re lying to yourself if you think you don’t take advantage of that flexibility yourself.
So in other words… There’s nuance. It’s not just how much we dislike the target, there’s other stuff to consider too. We need
Context 😲
You’re equivocating between two different questions: whether an act is justified and what the act is.
Yes, context matters when determining whether an action is morally or legally justified. Self-defense, necessity, and defense of others are all examples. I have never argued otherwise.
What I’ve been arguing is that context does not redefine the underlying act itself. If someone intentionally takes property without permission, that’s theft. It may be justified theft, just as killing in self-defense is still killing and, in many legal systems, would technically satisfy the actus reus of homicide while being legally excused or justified.
That’s why “a starving person stealing bread” is a classic moral dilemma. It’s compelling precisely because it’s still theft, even if most people agree it’s morally justified.
So when people celebrate the theft of construction materials simply because they dislike AI data centers, they’re making a moral argument, not changing the definition of theft. If they want to say, “I think this theft is justified,” that’s a coherent position. Saying “it’s not theft because I approve of it” is not.
That’s what they did… And then you complained that people were being too flexible with their morals.
You can keep shifting the goalpost now or just accept you didn’t word your OC very well.
I haven’t moved the goalposts.
What are you talking about?
I’ve been very consistent with what I’ve been saying. At no point have I claimed that people are being too flexible with their morals.
I’ve essentially made three points:
Theft is morally wrong, regardless of whether it can be justified in a particular circumstance.
Lemmy is being two-faced in how it applies its moral standards.
Theft is, by definition, wrongdoing.
I’ve repeatedly acknowledged that theft is highly nuanced and that there are situations where it can be morally justified. I’ve said that multiple times. My criticism is that many Lemmy users will admonish people who disagree with their personal opinions, yet turn around and excuse or even celebrate theft whenever it’s directed at something they dislike.
Either theft is theft, or it isn’t. Definitions don’t change based on personal opinion, and neither does the law. Whether an act is morally justified is a separate question from whether it still fits the definition of theft.
You are reacting to masses but attributing caricature as if the masses were individuals. You’re being played by the game. On any story there’s X% of people who are fuming over it, but its not the same people. You’re reacting to the system but treating broad categories as persons. By default, you’re strawmanning, and there’s power to that, but until you grow out of that mindset, you are ruled by the strawmen you create for yourself, or rather, who our cultural engineers create for you.
I am 14 and this is deep.
Do not bring up how deep fourteen year olds are around me. This is not what I need to be thinking about in my new Mormon life.
Omg. Your username!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
This is who I am. I identify as a Mormon Occultist, and so I am. But I don’t identify as an alcoholic, so I’m not. I’m gunna get into stand-up with this bit, I think.
When the tables are turned, they don’t give a fuck, why should we?
I see one unethical person robbing another unethical person. It’s the same reason I don’t care when bad things happen to criminals. Transgenders don’t fall into the same category as billionaires.
If a socialist did something unethical I’d root against them too.
You’re absolutely correct. As would I. The fact that someone is a socialist or transgender has no bearing on the content of their character. I was simply using examples of emotionally charged topics on this particular platform.
But theft is theft. Luigi Mangione murdered the CEO of United healthcare. That is not up for debate. Whether Luigi Mangione did something morally correct is an entirely separate and highly contested question.
I will still condemn Luigi Mangione for resorting to violence in the same way that I will condemn people stealing from AI data centers. Theft is theft. Murder is murder.
On a personal level, I couldn’t care less who steals what from a data center. The fewer of these things we have, the better. But my personal opinion does not change the principle. If I’m going to condemn theft when it affects people or causes I support, then I should condemn it when it affects people or causes I dislike as well.
Actually, it is. That’s what the whole, y’know, trial and “innocent until proven guilty” thing is about.
The current defense strategy for Luigi is emotional distress. They are fully admitting that he shot the man.
The question at trial will be. Is he culpable for the crimes.
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