Comment by gortok
5 hours ago
For a long time I was anti-licensure in tech; now with the bar being lowered to next to nothing, it seems as if licensure is more important than ever — not to protect this trade (though it will do that, and that is a benefit), but because the sheer amount of irresponsibility in the usage of LLMs and “AI” in general begs for licensure and adoption of a regulatory body for software in general.
This is unfortunately a feeling I share. It wasn't until LLMs have become nearly ubiquitous at this point, and there has been zero realistic technological response to the dangers they present. Not to mention I suspect there may be some psychological element to being exposed to interactions with AI models and their nonsense for hours a day. Not all of it is nonsense....but you won't ever know for sure.
100%. I don't think "AI" has changed anything wrt to the responsibility of the tech industry in general. Tech has always been pretty much devoid of ethics or a sense of responsibility at the executive level (and therefore "management" more broadly). But before LLMs it was easier for ethical engineers to surreptitiously steer things towards responsible implementations. I suspect also competence correlates pretty strongly with intellectual honesty--narcissists and other personality defectives generally aren't terribly capable of the kind of introspection necessary to learn deeply. With the deluge of LLM slop, it's much harder for even a responsible manager to differentiate the competent from the incompetent, and now the dishonest, unethical folks have more leverage.
So now the problem is highly visible. There's only one solution I can think of, and that's to hold individuals (not corporations) responsible for professional malfeasance.