Mastodawn

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."

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Omar Antolín

@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.

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josh's harp 10h ago

@oantolin the analogy is not meant to be read as literally as that :) But if you want to be literal, I think it does fit - LLMs and breaking and entering do both give you stuff, at the cost of harms to others, and you don't have a lot of control over what that stuff is... Probably it's mostly pretty commonplace stuff. And if you keep doing it, eventually there won't be anything valuable left to steal