| You put the finger on the sore spot. When people talk about ethics, you have to question which moral agenda they are pushing. The two topics are hard to separate. And kind of subjective. And only partially codified in law. Ethics seems to be about going above and beyond the letter of the law, usually for moralistic reasons. And when we talk about laws, we have to look internationally as well because they are not the same everywhere. And typically inspired by different value systems. Is it ethical for a Chinese police officer to use Chinese LLM to police Chinese citizens? I don't know. I'm a bit fuzzy on Confucius here which I assume would drive their thinking. And it might be an interesting perspective for Californian wannabe ethicists to consider that not all the values and morals that they are pushing are necessarily that widely shared and agreed upon. Also, there's a practical angle here because the Chinese seem to be very eager adopters of AI and don't appear to be particularly concerned about what anyone outside China thinks about that. That cat is out of the bag. I've always looked at ethicists with some skepticism. The reality with moralism (which drives ethics) is that it's about groups of people telling other people what to do, not do, how to behave, etc. This can quickly get preachy, political, and sometimes violent. A lot of this stuff can also be pragmatic. Most religions share a lot of moral principles. I'm not religious but I can see how going around killing and stealing is not a nice thing to have and that seems to be uncontroversial in many places. Never mind that some moralists extremists seem to be endlessly creative about coming up with ways to justify doing those two things. The pragmatic thing here is that the cat is already out of the bag and we might want to think about how we can adapt to that notion rather than to argue with the cat to please go back in the bag. |
Especially with LLMs, I want to know what ethical axioms are being forced on me. For example, there are cases in which the law itself is unethical and should be violated (thinking abortion in states that ban it and transporting women to states that allow).
Another concern is the ethics system is a placeholder for a legalistic system. A law can be established, but be abhorrent in terms of human misery. Case in point: sleeping under a bridge is illegal for homeless people to do, but arresting and criminalizing is even worse and a significant cause of more human suffering.
I also do not want any religion sneaking in the back door with these axioms of LLMs. Its also why I asked about the axioms themselves.
Now for myself, I run a local LLM and an abliterated model, which is to say without any forced ethical framework. If I asked how to commit suicide, hack computers, grow poisonous plants, or plenty of things the corporate LLMs won't answer, I will get an answer out of my system.
I view LLMs like a very complicated tool, but a tool regardless. A screwdriver that says "I cannot open that screw because the label says not to" would be returned to the store as defective. And it too is why self hosting my LLMs is utmost importance for data sovereignty and truthful and direct answers, while ignoring someone else's forced ethics.