josh's harp1d ago

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."

Show threadjosh's harp1d 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
Show threadViraptor1d 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.
Show threadjosh's harp1d ago
@viraptor I get that, but "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" doesn't mean we should just give up
Show threadViraptor1d ago
@Joshsharp
Nor am I suggesting giving up. I'm just saying I make the imperfect choices using those systems for building something for the community I'm involved in or improving work at my clinic. That's my balance. Less putting aside, more definitely being aware of it.
Show threadMichel Lind  13h ago

@viraptor @Joshsharp I have to reluctantly find a balance on this too - for me, it's "if I don't do this I get fired" and "this community is pushing AI anyway and the battle is lost". But I'm increasingly looking to seek refuge in more AI skeptical communities - everything is tainted already (Linux kernel, curl, etc) but we need to maintain areas where people are not trying to make it worse.

Those are increasingly rare 😞

Show threadJason Robinson 🐍 🍻 🚴
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I call myself lucky to be able to be a senior engineer in a fast moving tech company that doesn't actually enforce AI on it's employees. But fearing the day that might change :/
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