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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josh's harp 1d ago

My dude, if there are obvious moral and ethical implications, how are you able to "put them aside" so easily? I just don't get it

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Viraptor 22h ago

@Joshsharp
Honest answer: The same way that I'm writing this on a phone which both in the production process and as a software-social ecosystem has obvious moral and ethical implications. Or how I use retirement investment funds which likely prop up the price of many terrible corporations. Nothing's perfect and we make imperfect choices of balancing comfort of life with the world impact every single day.

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Bob Thomson

@viraptor @Joshsharp that’s a fair point. The slight difference to me is that if smart phones were replaced with Nokia bricks tomorrow, there would be a bit of an impact and adjustment to make that’d take time, whereas I think if all LLM chatbots ceased tomorrow, there would be little impact at all for the vast majority of folk, so we are not at all at a stage with LLM where they are indispensable and who knows when or if we will be for the average person?