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by jimkleiber
13 days ago
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It seems the author is instead arguing that we should say that AI is a destructive tool and we should not use it. I was hoping the article would not label it purely good or bad, but 1) highlight that AI is not just a tool but a very powerful tool and 2) and therefore it very much matters how we all use it and how it uses us. In this framing, we can see the things where it helps and hurts us and society and many levels at various intensities. The article mostly just seemed to say how bad it was, and I don't think being critical of a new tool means to only see how it harms us but rather to see the potential full range of impacts. |
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In my opinion it asks us to not just look at individual gain of using LLM's (which can be powerful), but also place it in context how we as humans built long-term sustainable societies. Most societies are currently ignoring that part for the most part, because they fear missing out.
Probably the hardest problem of LLM's is their ethics. As the author put it:
> Modern multi-billion parameter AI models are scaffolded on and made possible by the largest heist in human history: theft of everything that could be scraped from every corner of the digital spaces we share. Without prevention of and justice for this damage caused by current models, their use is highly fraught, ethically. We, as human beings, have developed complex social forms of intelligence when it comes to dealing with things like credit and provenance, two things that modern models are incapable of.
No one currently seems to have serious solution for this. Solving it the right way would be choosing the hard path. While some artists or writers are fighting for their rights, us programmers are collectively ignoring the issue. It is funny how most companies (and some individuals) only want to use LLM's of they don't train on their code. But is just fine to use some 40 years of collective open-source without any compensation or even acknowledgement.
This side of the story doesn't make LLM's less technically impressive, nor does it make the tools themselves less powerful. But unlike the industrial revolution, which some like to compare the AI boom to, during the industrial revolution humans built stronger productivity solely on innovation without strip mining all intellectual property in human existence.
I can see the benefits of LLM's, enjoy the technical capabilities and be impressed by the technology, and at the same time find these tools wholly unethical in their current form.