Like much of Facebook nowadays, the “California Life” Fb web page is stuffed with AI slop. There are generated photos of highway patrol officers holding up a groundhog and lengthy road signs detailing California quirks.
And in between these are posts that admonish AI information facilities.
“It’s not value giving up an inch of this for a knowledge middle,” reads one image, during which the phrases look carved right into a subject of crops.
“Not a single sq. inch of California is value giving up for an AI Information 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 information facilities. Comparable posts—many with similar wording, and related 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 sure extra).
A few of the feedback on these posts are fast to name out the irony of utilizing AI to make anti-AI information middle 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 seemingly that these feedback are AI is unclear, although actual people do seem to frequently interact with Fb’s flood of AI photos.)
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 middle. 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 via the identical patriarchal, racist frameworks that led to the oppression within the first place.
Over on X, one consumer this week obtained thousands of likes after declaring that “bot farms have discovered that anti-data middle posts on FB are good for engagement.”
Manufacturing unit farming
The posts seemingly aren’t meant to truly be a device towards the encroaching takeover of AI and its information facilities. Content material farmers, which have lengthy dominated sure corners of Fb, often publish about something that can get engagement.
However the truth that engagement seekers have zeroed in on the information middle debate is notable. Even when the intent isn’t real, the exercise means that there are a lot of likes and feedback to generate across the matter.
And that’s as a result of the anti-data middle sentiment is actual, and rising.
From Alabama to Wisconsin to Utah, residents are pushing again towards the information middle increase, protesting particular initiatives proposed of their areas.
In some situations, that backlash is working: Eight municipalities in Georgia have handed moratoriums on information middle improvement. Builders have withdrawn purposes after native opposition.
Between late March via June of 2025 alone, an estimated $98 billion in information middle initiatives had been blocked or delayed, in keeping with Data Center Watch.
Information facilities: Much less in style than nuclear energy?
Final yr, Change.org noticed a surge of petitions towards information middle initiatives: There have been no less than 113 petitions totaling round 50,000 signatures in 2025, in comparison with only one such petition relating to a knowledge middle in 2024, Quick Firm previously reported.
And that opposition isn’t slowing down. A current Gallup poll from Could 13 discovered that seven in 10 People oppose setting up AI information facilities of their areas; 48% of People are “strongly opposed.”
With 71% of People opposing information 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 information facilities fear about their useful resource use, for each water and power, in addition to noise, water, and air air pollution. And so they fear about financial penalties like greater utility payments.
These in favor of knowledge facilities (27% of People) principally cite financial advantages like job creation—although stories have discovered these initiatives 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. Information middle 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 publish about it again and again. AI is already mirroring our personal dislike of it proper again to us.
