[Osmose]

I've refused to work on AI-related initiatives at previous jobs, and will again if they ever come up. I have deep ethical objections about LLMs in terms of power use, consent for providing training data, fitness and safety of LLM-powered solutions for problems that cannot afford errors, and the potential and already-happening effects of replacing human workers without a suitable safety net for when their incomes disappear.

Crucially, I do not think predictions that all these issues will improve is a good enough justification to keep innovating before they have improved. Harm caused now is not undone just because we fixed the flaws later.

In that sense: I think feeling weird about the hype train is completely normal, but for different reasons. I do not want any complicity in legitimizing LLMs.

Besides ethical concerns, I also think the myriad applications of LLMs are mostly misguided market waste. In that sense, profiting off the hype could be seen as you simply slurping up some of that waste for yourself, and while I don't like that function of the system, I think the system is the issue rather than you trying to exist within it. If you don't share my ethical concerns or aren't objecting to the market's function of trying all ideas and assuming the good ones profit, then you're probably not really doing anything scummy by your own standards.