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by WatchDog 18 days ago
If you are worried about the ethics of using a company laptop to do personal work, you might be taking it a bit far, what damage does this do to the company?

If you are worried about the company claiming rights over your personal work, then it is prudent.

3 comments

As for what damage you do, it kind of depends on what you're doing. But in the end you're exposing your work machine to patterns and processes outside your normal job duties, potentially exposing it and the data/access it has to additional risks.

It might be overly paranoid depending on what the circumstances are, it might be a real concern as well.

1) It really had nothing to do with what damage it does to the company. It’s a long story, but I take personal Integrity fairly seriously. It was about how I felt about it, inside. As I progressed, in my self-development, “cash register” honestly became more important.

2) That’s definitely a valid point. I have worked on free/open-source code for most of my adult life. For a long time, it was for my own use, but I started publishing code for use by others, and provenance became a much more important coefficient.

I think that the new version of this is using your work's LLM account (potentially more powerful) to do personal work
That seems absolutely crazy to do. One could argue that the marginal cost to work for using a work laptop is zero and the work is still yours (still beyond the risk I’m willing to take). Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it.
> Using a company’s AI account is literally using the company’s resources for a personal project. There is no plausible case where they don’t own it.

Honestly, of the two scenarios, this one is the more likely to fall on the employee's side.

We haven't really tested the legal precedent for ownership of LLM outputs very thoroughly yet, and I'm willing to bet a bunch of us still have employment contracts that haven't been updated to cover LLM use...

That potentially consumes a lot more resources than the very negligible marginal wear and tear that using a work computer would cause.
There was a brief moment in all the hullabaloo that this went unnoticed :X