[_ttg]

I want to sympathize but enforcing a moral blockade on the "vast majority" of inbound inquiries is a self-inflicted wound, not a business failure. This guy is hardly a victim when the bottleneck is explicitly his own refusal to adapt.

[venturecruelty]

Survival is easy if you just sell out.

[aylmao]

It's unfair to place all the blame on the individual.

By that metric, everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world. Everyone pays taxes funding Israel, previously the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.

But no one believes this because sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.

[johnnyanmac]

>unfair to place all the blame on the individual.

I'm mostly blaming the rich.

>everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world.

Yeah we kind of are. So many chances to learn and push to reverse policy. Yet look how we voted.

>sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.

If it's between being homeless and joining ICE... I'd rather inflict the pain on myself than others. There are stances I will take, even of AI isn't the "line" for me personally. (But in not gonna optimize my portfolio towards that either).

>

[duskdozer]

It's unfair to place all the blame on an individual, not on the individual. Each individual is responsible for their share of the blame.

[venturecruelty]

>By that metric, everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world. Everyone pays taxes funding Israel, previously the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.

I mean, the Iraq War polled very well. Bush even won an election because of it, which allowed it to continue. Insofar as they have a semblance of democracy, yes, Americans are responsible. (And if their government is pathological, they're responsible for not stopping it.)

>But no one believes this because sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.

Two things. One, you don't have to pay taxes if you're rich. Two, tax protests are definitely a thing. You actually don't have to pay them. If enough people coordinated this, maybe we'd get somewhere.

[amrocha]

Honestly yeah. You are complicit and it is your fault. Either donate significant amounts, protest, or move.

[_ttg]

if the alternative to 'selling out' is making your business unviable and having to beg the internet for handouts(essentially), then yes, you should "sell out" every time.

[owenthejumper]

The guy won’t work with AI, but works with Google…

[averageRoyalty]

Thank you. I would imagine the entire Fortune 500 list passes the line of "evil", drawing that line at AI is weird. I assume it's a mask for fear people have of their industry becoming redundant, rather than a real morality argument.

[johnnyanmac]

"Works with Google" in what way? And at what tome-frame? Even as someone who's actively decoupling from Google it's hard to truly de-Googlefy in this world as is.

[venturecruelty]

"I have to do this societally deleterious thing or else someone else will." Is that the world you want to live in?

[wonderwonder]

Selling out is easy when your children have no food.

[johnnyanmac]

Is the author starving or does he have the savings to bear a few bad years?

[rglover]

Bingo. Moral grandstanding only works during the boom, not the come down. And despite being as big an idealist as they come, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. You can crusade, but you're just making your future self more miserable trying to pretend that you are more important than you think. Not surprising in an era of unbridled narcissism, but hey, that's where we are. People who have nothing to lose fail to understand this, whereas if you have a family, you don't have time for drum circles and bullshit: you've got mouths to feed.

[johnnyanmac]

>Not surprising in an era of unbridled narcissism, but hey, that's where we are.

Having the empathy to reject an endemic but poisonous trend is the opposite of narcissistic.

And we're making big assumptions on the author's finances. A bad year isn't literally a fatal year depending om the business and structure.

[voiper1]

Surely there's AI usage that's not morally reprehensible.

Models that are trained only on public domain material. For value add usage, not simply marketing or gamification gimmicks...

[qingcharles]

How many models are only trained on legal[0] data? Adobe's Firefly model is one commercial model I can think of.

[0] I think the data can be licensed, and not just public domain; e.g. if the creators are suitably compensated for their data to be ingested

[Eisenstein]

> How many models are only trained on legal[0] data?

None, since 'legal' for AI training is not yet defined, but Olma is trained on the Dolma 3 dataset, which is

1. Common crawl

2. Github

3. Wikipedia, Wikibooks

4. Reddit (pre-2023)

5. Semantic Scholar

6. Project Gutenberg

* https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.00159

[austinjp]

Nice, I hadn't heard of this. For convenience, here are HuggingFace models trained on Olma:

https://huggingface.co/datasets/allenai/dolma

https://huggingface.co/models?dataset=dataset:allenai/dolma

[nrhrjrjrjtntbt]

I wonder if there is a pivot where they get to keep going but still avoid AI. There must be for a small consultancy.

[sddhrthrt]

> "a self-inflicted wound"

"AI products" that are being built today are amoral, even by capitalism's standards, let alone by good business or environmental standards. Accepting a job to build another LLM-selling product would be soul-crushing to me, and I would consider it as participating in propping up a bubble economy.

Taking a stance against it is a perfectly valid thing to do, and the author is not saying they're a victim due to no doing of their own by disclosing it plainly. By not seeing past that caveat and missing the whole point of the article, you've successfully averted your eyes from another thing that is unfolding right in front of us: majority of American GDP is AI this or that, and majority of it has no real substance behind it.

[aylmao]

I too think AI is a bubble, and besides the way this recklessness could crash the US economy, there's many other points of criticism to what and how AI is being developed.

But I also understand this is a design and web development company. They're not refusing contracts to build AI that will take people's jobs, or violate copyright, or be used in weapons. They're refusing product marketing contracts; advertising websites, essentially.

This is similar to a bakery next to the OpenAI offices refusing to bake cakes for them. I'll respect the decision, sure, but it very much is an inconsequential self-inflicted wound. It's more amoral to fully pay your federal taxes if you live in the USA for example, considering a good chunk are ultimately used for war, the CIA, NSA, etc, but nobody judges an average US-resident for paying them.

[johnnyanmac]

>They're not refusing contracts to build AI that will take people's jobs, or violate copyright, or be used in weapons.

They very well might be. Websites can be made to promote a variety of activity.

>This is similar to a bakery next to the OpenAI offices refusing to bake cakes for them

That's not what "marketing" is. This is OpenAI coming to your firm and saying "I need you to make a poster saying AI is the best thing since Jesus Christ". That very much will reflect on you and the industry at large as you create something you don't believe in.

[aylmao]

> They very well might be. Websites can be made to promote a variety of activity.

This is disingenuous and inflamatory, and a manichaeist attitude I very much see in rich western nations for some reason. I wrote about this in another comment: it's sets people off on a moral crusade that is always against the players but rarely against the system. I wish more people in these countries would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims, not just specifically AI as one of many examples.

The problem isn't AI. The problem is a system where new technology means millions fearing poverty. Or one where profits, regardless of industry, matter more than sustainability. Or one where rich players can buy their way around the law— in this case copyright law for example. AI is just the latest in a series of products, companies, characters, etc. that will keep abusing an unfair system.

IMO over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole is a distraction bound to always bring disappointment, and bound to keep moral players at a disadvantage constantly second-guessing themselves.

[johnnyanmac]

>This is disingenuous and inflamatory

I fail to see how. Why would I not hold some personal responsibility for what I built?

Its actually pretty anti-western to have that mindset since that's usually something that pops up in collectivist societies.

>it's sets people off on a moral crusade that is always against the players but rarely against the system.

If you contribute to the system you are part of the system. You may not be "the problem" but you don't get guilt absolved for fanning the flames of a fire you didn't start.

I'm not suggesting any punishment for enablers. But guilt is inevitable in some people over this, especially those proud of their work.

>I wish more people in these countries would channel this discomfort as general disdain for the neoliberal free-market of which we're all victims,

I can and do.

>The problem isn't AI. The problem is a system where new technology means millions fearing poverty.

Sure. Doesn't mean AI isn't also a problem. We're not a singlethreaded being. We can criticize the symptoms and attack the source.

>over-focusing on small moral cursades against specific players like this and not the game as a whole is a distraction bound to always bring disappointment

I don't disagree. But the topic at hand is about AI, and talking about politics here is the only thing that gets nastier. I have other forums to cover that (since HN loves to flag politics here) and other IRL outlets to contribute to the community here.

Doesn't mean I also can't chastise how utterly sold out this community can be on AI.