jcoglanzooming out a little bit, it does feel alarming to me that a lot of people whose stated politics are progressive or socialist or both are willing to give huge tech companies an easy ride for fully seizing the means of production for everyone, no matter where you personally work
and also deploying arguments like "if you're gonna be a hard-liner about ethics you got into the wrong industry" -- you can recognise this field is full of awful things and *therefore* be very choosy about where you work, not just throw your hands up and go "why bother"
framing actually being militant about your values and red lines and what you are willing to do for a pay cheque as just pissing and moaning and being a stick-in-the-mud, is just bad faith, sorry
I didn't want this stuff to make me as angry as it has but some people need to hold themselves to better standards I swear
"it is overwhelmingly likely this will continue on account of capital interests" is not the same thing as "this is inevitable and you should give up". see also: "no ethical consumption" does not mean you shouldn't try to act ethically
Misty
Bit_form
charlag@jcoglan related
https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@dumpsterqueer/statuses/01JWTRYVAQWQ1QG1HNPJQHM05Y
https://gts.superseriousbusiness.org/@dumpsterqueer/statuses/01JWTRYVAQWQ1QG1HNPJQHM05Y
Post by tobi is writing bugs , @dumpsterqueer@superseriousbusiness.org
never ever ever ever trust a computer toucher!! they have no class solidarity at all and they will sell their grandma for the most minuscule chance of upward mobility toward the echelons of the tech ruling class that they so obsequiously admire! they are, by and large, class traitors who will sell o...
nicopap@jcoglan also consider that as an expert in the field you know better than anyone else, where the red line lies in tech.
Maybe there is similar good vs bad companies in other fields. You just don't know them because you are not an expert in them. So the ethics argument applies as much outside of tech as inside of it.
Jan Lehnardt 
@jcoglan I’ve seen capital A anarchists be all “what’s the big deal”. I don’t get it.
Simon Willison@jcoglan what's the alternative?
It turns out LLMs are pretty easy to build now that we know how to do it. 5TB of data (not difficult to obtain) and a few millions of dollars in compute electricity turns out to do the job.
@jcoglan at this point even nation-wide legislation would be difficult, seems to me you'd need some kind of international action to cut this off
@simon I'm hearing "what's the alternative" a lot recently and if I took that attitude to very many things I would have to stop believing in anything
@jcoglan my chosen alternative is to try and teach people how to use these things productively and responsibly in a way that adds more value than it takes away
@simon @jcoglan I’m already getting stopped at “5TB data is easy to obtain” (without consent). There is no “responsibly” for me after that.
But even if it were, there are so many more things wrong with all this that I have a hard time understanding how anyone uses them at all outside of their manager tells them to because investments were made.
But that’s me, I’ve also never ridden an Uber. I must be holding things wrong.
Raphael Lullis@raphael @simon @jcoglan you are carving out an exception that is not relevant to my argument. It is extremely well documented that most popular LLMs have been trained on otherwise copyrighted materials and reproduce those in ways that is likely not covered by fair use (but I don’t have much hope for a legal argument, so moral it remains.
I don't think the problem is in the tool itself. The troubling part to me is what @jcoglan
mentioned.
If all the "anti-AI" crowd focused their criticism and opposition on the corporations that are trying to monopolize and seek rent out of the whole world's information, it would be easier (I think) to gather more people on their side.
Not🐧A🐧Convicted🐧Felon
ben@benjamineskola @janl @simon @jcoglan
If you problem is with the abstract concept of the tool, then no possible implementation will ever be morally acceptable, no matter the upside.
If your problem is "only" with the existing implementations, then it follows that there exists a theoretical implementation which can be accepted and bring the upside without the downsides.
@raphael @janl @simon @jcoglan not sure there’s much point in spending time thinking about hypothetical future implementations tbh. Until such a thing exists then we have to consider that all of the existing ones have these issues; even if it’s potentially possible to solve the issues nobody has actually done so and nobody seems about to do so (as far as I’m aware).
(And even if such an ‘ethical’ LLM did exist, I think it would be valid to remain concerned about the huge market share of unethical ones.)
@benjamineskola @janl @simon @jcoglan
1) No one is saying "we should not be concerned about the dominance of the unethical companies". We should, we are.
2) If we don't clear establish the line between what is acceptable and what is not acceptable, good actors will never be involved and bad actors will never have competition from good actors, and will be validated in doing the bad things they do.
@raphael I am okay to be dropped from this thread now.
@benjamineskola @simon @jcoglan
3) If we treat all and any usage of LLMs as equally morally unacceptable, we end up with "abstinence-only is the only acceptable sex-ed policy".
@benjamineskola @simon @jcoglan
- You don't see many parents encouraging their teenage kids to have sex, but they still should have "the talk" with them anyway.
- Shooting heroin is still damaging to people. Giving needles and heroin to addicts is still "unethical". Yet, we still have "damage reduction" policies where city clinics give clean needles and drugs to addicts.
- Even Richard Stallman advocated it was okay to use closed software to develop FOSS alternatives (e.g, C compilers)
@benjamineskola @simon @jcoglan
It used to be that one of the main arguments against all and any blockchain technology was "It is burning the planet".
It took 7 years for the Ethereum team to finally develop a system that was robust enough and could get them out of Proof-of-Work. Nowadays, the Ethereum network secures billions of dollars worth of assets while using less electricity than all the videogame consoles *at idle*, yet we still have people using the same tired (and wrong) argument.
Can you stipulate what would pass for an "ethical" LLM?
This is just obscurantism. It's opposition for the sake of opposition, which makes it super easy to be ignored by bad actors.
Open Risk@simon @jcoglan yeah, education is really the key to a different digital kingdom.
The problem is that all sorts of social malfunctions and coordination frictions make the reaction time to emergent new possibilities slower than the action time of super resourced private interests with no moral or legal constraints.
But long term the techbros can not control LLM's any more than anybody can control and extract rents on the use of human language. They are simply a compression of digitized speech.
normy foxyoreos@simon @jcoglan Simon. Taking the best read of this possible, if you think your current role is just encouraging responsible usage, and that you are not also fueling *increased usage* of these tools, and that you are not being linked to by AI evangelists, and that you are not carrying any water for companies like Meta, Google, and OpenAI - then you are utterly disconnected from the actual real impact of your writing.
You are not a passive observer of AI market trends, you are a cheerleader.
@simon @jcoglan you're really gonna say "what's the alternative" to market capture at the same time you're writing excitedly about whatever the most recent OpenAI product is?
The alternative is not doing that. You have more influence than you are pretending you have here, and if you don't think that your writing has helped any of these companies grow, you are sticking your head in the sand.
Proposal for alternatives: every product that "uses AI" must either be available on a copyleft license or gets taxed at 100%, no exceptions.
Cap all corporations at a maximum of 150 employees (any contractor working more 15h/week for the same client counts as an employee), no individual may sit on the executive board of more than a single corporation. If "AI" is such a powerful productivity lever, global corporations are no longer needed.
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras@jcoglan yep, too many people who think themselves smart just raising their hands saying "there's no alternative" while also 'selflessly' (lol) trying to make a buck out of not giving a shit.
@jcoglan but they havent really "seized" the means of (digital) production. The rules and scarcities of the digital economy are not the same as the grain, bricks and steel eras.
They literally only seized the moment, i.e., acted faster than all other forms of social organization, which is the essence of the "move fast and break" mantra.
It takes very little to reclaim control of the digital realm, as proven by the miniscule resources that built the #fediverse, #bluesky, #deepseek etc. etc.