[motoxpro]

I think it's closer to asking a remote (human) assistant to do something that someone doesn't want done (e.g., view the source of a closed-source product, whether through reverse engineering, going into their office, or social engineering) and that remote assistant company saying, "Please stop asking our assistants to do that."

You can still use an IDE (hammer) to reverse engineer anything you want.

[Wilder7977]

It's not though. It's still just a piece of code, much closer to IDEs or any other program than to a human assistant in any way that matters (morals, responsibility).

[motoxpro]

It just seems like you are saying if you found out Claude code was a bunch of remote working doing work for you, then it would be morally wrong to do illegal/morally wrong/irresponsible things with them, but because it is NOT a human, those same things are fine?

[Wilder7977]

Yes, correct.

Is the distinction between human labor/actions and a program executing hard to grasp?

Moral is a human thing, not an absolute thing, so of course it's different if there is a single human involved and a tool, and a human with a relationship to other humans.

[motoxpro]

I just have different moral preferences. I think its morally wrong to do illegal/morally wrong/irresponsible things in general, whether I am using a hammer, a car, a company, or AI.

It's worse to ask someone else to break a window with a hammer for me, but the window still got broken, and the person whose window it was is still sad/out of money/etc.

The thought experiment was that if you were doing illegal things with an AI, you would not feel bad, but if you found out that the AI was a person, you would feel bad. That is very strange to me, more a feeling of guilt/shame.