Programmer Humor

Yes, but it is very important to distinguish between LLMs, which are amoral math, and OpenAI et al, which are corporations run by fascists that offer LLM-based public surveillance / disinformation platforms. There is no technology on earth that cannot be bent to malign purpose if malicious people are inclined to do so. LLMs are just the popular useful technology du jour.

I got called unethical today for using a small-scale locally hosted open model trained on Wikipedia and Stack Exchange. A LOT of the anti-AI people are universalists that have decided carte blanche that it is an evil technology and everyone who uses it is bad.

Even most of of the local and "open" models are exploiting the work of others by training off unethically sourced data without even so much as consent.

There is such a thing as ethical AI, but damn near zero people are doing it that way.

The torment nexus isn't a discrete thing. You can't make thumbscrews without screws. Are the screws evil? If not, when does the composition of components become evil? I don't think LLMs are evil for the same reason I don't think thumbscrews are evil in and of themselves. Thumbscrews, like LLMs, lack the capacity for evil. It's the people who turn technology against their fellow humans that I hold as my enemy, not the trappings of their mischief. Remove them from the equation, and the torment nexus becomes so much harmless scrap, ready to be beaten into plowshares.

surveillance networks are made of computers and sensors, which are made of chips and wires. I don't think chips and wires are fascist, I don't think sensors and computers are fascist. I think the purpose to which they are put is the fascist part, and the purpose is pure human.

No, but I believe machine translation is now powered mainly by LLMs, which is a damn useful application of the technology.

I was surprised to learn recently that a few of my friends pay for Claude to help with personal projects and things like that. This particular AI tech is quite new so it's surely too early to declare axiomatically that it has no uses. That sounds like an emotional reaction to me.

Respectfully, you have no idea what you're talking about. I've been an AI researcher for 12 years now. I work primarily in climate and environment, and right now I'm using AI for super resolution of wind field predictions, to better forecast wildfire spread. Prior to this project I was using AI and remote sensing to monitor and predict wheat crop health in northern India to feed into various food security monitoring systems (e.g. FEWSNET). There are millions of AI use cases that tangibly improve the world.

At the same time, those same underlying principles of AI are being used to develop tools to better surveil people, control them, and profit off of them so the tech fascists can gain even more control. Both things can be true. It's the billionaires who are funding these massive investments that are evil. It's always the billionaires.

Steel can be used to construct buildings and can also be used to construct weapons. You wouldn't say steel is evil right?

Brother you can run that shit local and all of your claims have so many asterisks attached that they're essentially pointless. Everything you claimed is entirely true of base computers no ai. Hell even just internet access has been shown to have all the same negative effects. And I'm defending it because I'm not stupid and it's a useful technology. Run your shit local. The tech bro goons don't own the technology.

That is a very good point, Master Wayne. Thank you for calling me out. Going forward, I will try to avoid such mistakes.

Fighting local models is playing right into enshittification, though.

They WANT people to be scared of "AI." They want people to keep talking about it as this existential anthropomorphized danger, not a tool theyve enshittified.

Because the thing that keeps Altman/Modi up at night is the proliferation of trifty, dirt cheap open weights models. Ones presented as tools, not intelligence. And every bit people rail against them is more ammunition to regulate those open models away, so they have a monopoly.