Acting ethically in an imperfect world
tante.cc
Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]

People do not believe that “not using LLMs” will solve the issue of OpenAI etc all existing. They do no want to build on, use products with so clearly defined harms and negative externalities. Because they believe it to be wrong. Sure, there might be a utilitarian argument for “the thing exists anyways and if it saves you time, that’s good, right” but many people are not utilitarians. They want to lead a life where they feel their actions align with their values. (…)

(Cory argues) that we need to “liberate” technology. What a strange idea: Technology doesn’t need liberation, people do. Technologies are tools not what we actually care about. Sure, sometimes technologies can play a role in liberating people but just as often “freeing” a technology does quite the opposite to people: Ask the women who have massive amounts of nonconsensually created sexualized images and videos created of them whether they think that the “liberation” of stochastic images generators is liberating them? Technology doesn’t need to be free. It cannot be free because freedom as a concept applies to people.

  • MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com
    4·
    11 days ago

    Thanks for posting this. Really interesting article and good, representative choice of excerpts. I feel like this is a topic people often speak past each other on and I think he really does a great job of avoiding that.