To my students

"I do not and will not use LLMs, in any form, for any purpose. Although LLMs are fascinating from a purely technical perspective, I refuse to participate in or contribute to such systems that are built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources. I also don't think they are actually very good for a lot of the applications people seem excited about. Even in cases where LLMs are technically good at a task, that does not necessarily mean their use for that task contributes positively to human flourishing.

A good way to describe myself is as a generative AI vegetarian. You can find a fuller explanation—and many, many links—at the above essay by Sean Boots, which I agree with almost 100%."

In my computer engineering undergrad ~8 years ago in the US, an ethics class was mandatory, but IIRC the CS curriculum did not have it, despite both leading to similar careers. My memory may be wrong though.

Edit: they do seem to have one now, so either I remembered wrong or they added it.

Edit 2: I remember enjoying my ethics class, we covered some of the usual examples, and also things like basic contract negotiations. But I think I still didn't register that these concerns were real at that time. It was easy to believe that I wouldn't be working on anything that impactful. This did change once I started work.

And they had a valid point.

This line again.

There's something so off-putting about academics giving industry advice when they haven't spent a day working as an engineer at a company.

> Care deeply about your craft. Refactor code until it is clear and elegant. Write good documentation for other humans to read. Have the courage to go slowly, especially when everyone else is telling you that you need to go fast and cut corners.

Outside of the bit on avoiding cutting corners, this advice seems like a straight path towards unemployment in a few years. The implication is that "your craft" is writing and polishing code, a skill which seems to be increasingly antiquated in favor of higher level system design. Who is going to read your carefully crafted documentation lol? The agents who replace you?

If a tree falls in the forest...