Comment by dkdcio
3 months ago
counter example: me! autocorrect, spam filters, search engines, blurred backgrounds, medical image processing, even revenue forecasting with logistic regression are “AI” to me and others in the industry
I started my career in AI, and it certainly didn’t mean LLMs then. some people were doing AI decades ago
I would like to understand where this moral line gets drawn — neural networks that output text? that specifically use the transformer architecture? over some size?
When Stable Diffusion and GitHub Copilot came out a few years ago is when I really started seeing this "immoral" mentality about AI, and like you it really left me scratching my head, why now and not before? Turns out, people call it immoral when they see it threatens its livelihood and come up with all sorts of justifications that seem justifiable, but when you dig underneath it, it's all about their economic anxiety, nothing more. Humans are not direct creatures, it's much more emotional than one would expect.
I believe it's more nuanced than that.
The immoral thing about gen-AI is how it's trained. Regardless of source code, images or audio; the disregard of licenses and considering everything fair-use and ingesting them is the most immoral part.
Then there comes the environmental cost, and how it's downplayed to be able to pump the hype.
I'm not worried about the change AI will bring, but the process of going there is highly immoral, esp. when things are licensed to prohibit that kind of use.
When AI industry says "we'll be dead if we obey the copyright and licenses", you know something is wrong. Maybe the whole industry shouldn't build a business model of grabbing whatever they can and running with it.
Because of these zealots, I'm not sharing my photos anymore and considering not sharing the code I write either. Because I share these for the users, with appropriate licenses. Not for other developers or AI companies to fork, close and do whatever do like with them.
I find copyright itself immoral. Intellectual "property" is a made up fiction that shouldn't exist and only entrenches existing players, see Disney lobbying continuously to get higher and higher copyright durations all to keep Mickey under their control, until very recently; patents too are not filed by individual inventors anymore, it's massive corporations and patent trolls that serve no useful purpose. There is a reason many programmers like open source and especially copyleft, the latter of which is an explicit battling of the copyright system through its own means. Information should be free to be used, it should not be hoarded by so-called copyright holders.
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