Pete Prodoehl 🍕I'm not against ethical AI, I just haven't seen it yet.
DanDan420@rasterweb The term "AI" is very broad, but if we're talking about generative AI, DeepSeek is pretty interesting. They took a smarter approach, rather than throwing more and more processing power against the wall hoping something sticks, they've optimized it to make do with less. I wouldn't go as far as to call it "ethical", but at least it uses a lot less electricity.
@DanDan420 A guy I know said he's running an open source AI engine locally, and he's trained it all on his own images (he's a photographer using it to come up with ideas for photoshoots) so in a case like this... would that be ethical?
@rasterweb
The way I see it there are four major ethical issues with today's AIs:
1. Disproportionately large energy consumption
2. Intellectual property theft
3. Blurring the line between reality and fiction with deep fakes and hallucinations
4. Shoving AI into every fucking thing (which exacerbates the above).
With that in mind, your acquaintance's model seems quite benign. There a lot of cool and interesting stuff you can do with small and specialized models.
Even large and general models (like LLMs) can be built ethically with the above points in mind. The problem (as with most things today) lies with enshitification rather than the technology itself.
@DanDan420 Would it be fair to say that AI in the service of Capitalism will never be ethical?
@rasterweb Yes, although I'd say "very unlikely" rather than "never"; but that's an indictment of capitalism rather than AI.
@DanDan420 It took me much to long to realize that Capitalism weaponizes nearly anything it can against the well being of people.
@rasterweb All our lives we've been told that Capitalism drives innovation, progress, increases standard of living; but Capitalism doesn't care about human well-being or suffering, it only values the acquisition of capital and profit maximization; the "Greed is good" mode of thinking. At best that makes it amoral, indifferent to the needs of the community, but more and more it seems antagonistic: like rich people don't just need to get richer and richer, they also need everyone else to be poorer.