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To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

musings.martyn.berlin

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Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#41

Post by macintux »

Silagi wrote: post #31

Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic. You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn…

Some of us have loathed Uber, Airbnb & Meta. Are we allowed to be negative about AI?

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#42

Post by lyoncy »

What most AI companies won't tell you is that creating a massive amount of new code will result in an overwhelming amount of technical debt for companies worldwide, sooner or later. Many organisations now believe that they can develop their own apps form scratch using AI, but if they don't pay for tokens capable of handling their ever-growing infrastructure code, their infrastructure will rot. The tendency to reinvent the wheel has always been a problem in the software industry, and AI will only accelerate this trend.

Nevertheless, I'm optimistic that an LLM will be developed sooner or later that is fully aware of the open-source ecosystem and can create software in the correct way: This would involve using pre-existing code and reviewed modules that are plugged together and optimised to create as little new code as possible while reusing as much open-source code as possible.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#43

Post by wincy »

brabel wrote: post #35
ronbenton wrote: post #7

>This makes me an outcast. In tech, and out of it. In tech, maybe. Out of tech? No way. A bunch of surveys show that people are mostly negative on AI. For example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...

Is this a case of people saying one thing and doing another?? Everyone's experience is different, but to me it seems most people love AI?! I see reports in the news about people not being able to do anything anymore without asking AI first, people dating AI boy/girlfriends, students using AI to do homework, teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students, people writing emails via AI, improving their own writing w…

Yeah this strikes me as everyone loudly complaining about how they hate McDonald’s and yet every McDonald’s has a drive thru line 24/7.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#44

Post by CamperBob2 »

okeuro49 wrote: post #10

Its funny that the article uses Wikipedia as an example, given it is a tool that always needs a caveat: "anyone can edit it, always use the source, never trust it directly." There are many instances where I have seen Wikipedia have bias, or be misinformation. AI just needs the caveat that it is not really intelligent, but a very good predictive text machine, which you should always ask to provide citations.

"Really not intelligent," yet capable of taking gold at international math and programming competitions.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#45

Post by AbrahamParangi »

This is going to be an unpopular reply I imagine but this person is not well and their behavior should not be imitated. This is a classic example of omnicause anxiety, like people who refuse to have children because of all these things happening in the world as if the world hasn't always been a mess. Frankly, ridiculous.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#46

Post by eggbrain »

> [...] People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.

I believe people do understand the toll caring about something deeply takes -- but caring about all these things at once, many which you personally can't control, feels more like atlas syndrome or compassion fatigue by the author.

I also find the author a bit all-or-nothing in general. Losing friends because they use AI? Why does the dichotomy have to be so black and white? Can people have moral quandaries about AI while still using it, or does the moral stance always have to be absolute?

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#47

Post by CurtMonash »

Silagi wrote: post #31

Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic. You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn…

Partially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. Ditto the overlapping issue of global intellectual property appropriation. (Much of what LLMs do is refactor what people posted on the web for free.)

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#49

Post by Retr0id »

4ndrewl wrote: post #28
mlyle wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a lot of it is silly. What, we can't use AI even to show it's silly and incomplete? How are people supposed to know the ways it's incomplete if we cannot evaluate it?

First principles?

That would be nice, but the emergent properties of LLMs defy any kind of first-principles reasoning if you ask me.

Re: To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks

#50

Post by hcsennczadno »

brabel wrote: post #35
ronbenton wrote: post #7

>This makes me an outcast. In tech, and out of it. In tech, maybe. Out of tech? No way. A bunch of surveys show that people are mostly negative on AI. For example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...

Is this a case of people saying one thing and doing another?? Everyone's experience is different, but to me it seems most people love AI?! I see reports in the news about people not being able to do anything anymore without asking AI first, people dating AI boy/girlfriends, students using AI to do homework, teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students, people writing emails via AI, improving their own writing w…

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