It really bums me out that I keep seeing blog posts from technical people like "putting aside the obvious moral and ethical implications of LLMs, I'm interested in evaluating whether they can be useful for my work."
Like "putting aside the obvious moral and ethical concerns of breaking into my neighbours' houses, I'm interested in evaluating whether this can be useful for acquiring other people's valuables."
@StefanGaller @Joshsharp this, 100%. i have ethical issues with gen-ai and won't use it but i've driven cars my whole life 🙃
(cars are at least useful, though humans did fine without them for a long time, and there were probably plenty of weirdos who held out against them as dangerous and disruptive back in the day. they were not wrong)
@Joshsharp It's simple, they said that to forestall a tiresome lecture.
For training coding AIs, anything with a liberal license is on board with it according to the license. At least as far as that goes (most of github's contents...) there aren't any "moral and ethical implications".
@hopeless you're quite wrong: all free software licenses at the very least require retaining attribution.
and of course you chose ignoring all other extractive aspects of building the large commercial models.
I am not required (by copyright law rather than the license...) to attribute squat if I read, eg, MIT code and use the ideas I saw in there to write something different. Just like there's no attribution for container_of in the Linux kernel despite the idea came from elsewhere.
> and of course you chose ignoring all other extractive aspects of building the large commercial models.
Is there something specific you have in mind from this handwaving dark muttering I should care about?
@hopeless if you copy the code verbatim, as the coding llms are frequently wont to do, you need to attribute the author in order to comply with the licence.
and copyright and free software license washing destroys the commons people built for decades.
as to your other question, yes, obviously.
but also i'm not going to participate in your sealioning exercise any longer that i need.
have an adequate remainder of your life now.
Yes nobody owes me shit. However if they want to reply disagreeing with me, they should at least make their case.
They shouldn't run off the moment the understandings they thought they had based on "everyone knows" get challenged, such as their wrong understanding of what's in Copyright Law vs the License, or their cherished beliefs it's OK to hate on AI and anyone using it because they are more "moral".
In the economy of unfettered wealth, the point of moral and ethical obligations is to put them aside. The immoral see morality as a straw man argument.
"Putting aside the moral and ethical implications, I enjoy posting stuff on Mastodon using my genocide processor and genocide graphics chip"
@Joshsharp maybe it’s about trying to find where to draw a line about morals and ethics in capitalism.
I’d argue that there have been no moral or ethical roles in corporate tech for decades, and anyone claiming there are is already compromised. I make no claims about my own complicity or lack thereof this millennium.
"but other than that, mrs lincoln, how was the play?"
@Joshsharp I find it deeply disappointing too, especially when I see it coming from people who are in control of their own working conditions.
Sometimes I think the intent is to find a way of engaging with people who clearly do not subscribe to those moral and ethical concerns (you'll never convince someone who doesn't care about the environmental impact to see the environmental impact as a dealbreaker) in order to convey that there are still insurmountable problems/shortcomings
Any paragraph which starts with "Like" is inevitably a cheap shot.
s/A.I./slavery/g in my mind, always and forever.
Same kind of exploitation, just less direct.
@StOnSoftware @Joshsharp Well, they spew out junk data while consuming huge amounts of electricity and cooling water. Freely copying is one thing, jacking up people's electricity bills while further heating the climate is quite another.
Using an LLM instead of your head is like using a Learjet to commute to work.
@Joshsharp I think those doing it(atleast here and the ones I've read), are evaluating the usefulness of the technology by itself.
The point is not to throw away the ethics, but to understand if the technology is worth it at all.
If so, an ethical implementation, e.g. a coding LLM that trains on and generates boilerplate can be considered.
@Joshsharp I understand that your main point is that the moral and ethical problems alone are enough to stay away from LLMs, but are you also making the secondary point that LLMs are obviously useful for people's work?
I ask because in your analogy the answer is that yes, the immoral and unethical practice of breaking and entering actually would be useful for acquiring people's stuff.
@Joshsharp Today I needed a network diagram. I never liked drawing on a computer. It is a mindless and annoying task.
Instead, I drew it roughly on paper. Then took a picture, uploaded it to Gemini, and told Gemini to make it look neat and professional. What I got back was done after one spelling correction.
What are the moral and ethical implications of that? It definitely did work from a pragmatic perspective.
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