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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

#181

Post by hyperhello »

adampunk wrote: post #162
thewebguyd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now. Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying…

>Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. This is such a wild thing to bring up unprompted.

Would you assume he was a far-right nut job?

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

#182

Post by gobdovan »

skeledrew wrote: post #169
gobdovan wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ tests are restandardised from time to time. We could take the scores from 100 years ago and see that everybody would be gifted. Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.

So it's an ever-shifting goalpost, which makes it pretty useless as an objective.

Yeah, but there's attempts to fix it. The Cholet paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547) is a good attempt, shifting from measuring ~skill to measuring ~acquiring skill. It's the framework behind ARC-AGI benchmarks.

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

#183

Post by coffeefirst »

thewebguyd wrote: post #87
derac wrote: post #24

It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a par…

> you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now. Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying…

This is a terminally online thing. It makes people more extreme. It also prevents them from realizing just how intense their POV is when everyone in their internet bubble is one upping each other.

In the real world I still encounter more moderation than not except from people who spend a lot of time on TikTok.

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

#184

Post by intended »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #159
michaelt wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Are you having these conversations about politics in person? Or are these conversations happening on Twitter/Reddit/HN/whatever? In my experience, online forums don't really work for political discussion for a bunch of reasons. If y…

> Are you having these conversations in person? I can't speak for the other poster but I've had the experience they described in-person, when I was living in Victoria I rented an apartment downtown Victoria and had pretty frequent run-ins with addicts on the streets. My friends who lived and worked further out away from the downtown core had very strong opinions about it any time I had anything negative to say about…

However your experience isn't necessarily where the other poster is coming from.

As a counter point, I have more nuanced conversations in person and am able to do it online; however I have also moderated a community for several years and learned how to do it.

From what I can remember of research, is that there is a difference in how people express themselves online vs offline.

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

#185

Post by tedmiston »

dcrazy wrote: post #16
Almondsetat wrote: post #4

I clicked on the article thinking it would be about having a moral stance, when it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance

Real “I am persecuted for my genius” energy.

Reads like a post straight from r/iamverysmart.

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

#186

Post by tptacek »

w29UiIm2Xz wrote: post #180
derac wrote: post #24

It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a par…

No technology will have me "excited" if the prospect is lower/no compensation and poorer working conditions. I concur on the nuance -- I use it as a tool at work. I see value in it. I see business value in it displacing me, even if that's not the maximally correct position because some higher up did some numeric calculations. The first prompt I got a decent reply to was a thrill. Then the thinking of the second-order…

Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.

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

#187

Post by intended »

derac wrote: post #24

It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a par…

> According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month.

> But it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human page views falling 8% year-over-year,

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/wikipedia-says-traffic-is-...

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

#188

Post by tedmiston »

> I know the technology, I understand what it's doing and I know the impact, so I am vehemently anti-AI.

Author: Goes on to demonstrate superficial (mis)understanding of the technology by proliferating misconceptions peppered with anecdata and heavy virtue signaling and calling it a blog post.

Hmm, okay, then...

Is anyone else annoyed by this kind of ironically [^1] weak thinking / writing that conflates: (1) one's own personal opinions and biases however long-standing or irrelevant; (2) limited working knowledge of the actual technology; and (3) virtue signaling / moral posturing / etc? ... and then ultimately just stirs that all up in a pot to not actually say anything more substantial than "AI bad". It's such an overstated, bland, lifeless, useless, uninteresting, intellectually lazy take.

Clutching onto a weak opinion, strongly held [^2] does not make one an "outcast" ... it just comes off as closed-minded and melodramatic. Is that even contrarian? Being on the majority side of an unnuanced opinion is about as far away from being an outcast as possible...

--

Very few of the moral panic type issues those vehemently opposed to LLMs are raising repeatedly are really unique to that field... because why? [Because LLMs are not the problem.]

- Where was said moral posturing when we were building the cloud computing infrastructure?

- Where is the concern of "wasting" compute resources when using 10–15 GB of bandwidth to stream a 90-min movie in 4k?

--

[^1]: Better not call the poorly written human authored post of poor quality "slop" though!

[^2]: Not a typo.

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

#189

Post by Barrin92 »

YoukaiCountry wrote: post #114
ambicapter wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.

If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?

>We can have actual conversations with our computers

conversational interfaces we've had for decades. In fact this goes so far back that people thought ELIZA was sentient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect), and not just laypersons but even the people working on it.

The actual lesson from this stuff is that linguistic interfaces fry people's brains, you could convince nerds that a brick was intelligent if you hooked it up to the voice of Scarlett Johansson. The perception that these systems are in any meaningful way intelligent, when they start getting stuck in a doom loop of fixing the same two bugs by reintroducing them in circles or give entire reviews for a music album that doesn't actually exist, is entirely in the head of the user.

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

#190

Post by strueman »

derac wrote: post #24

It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech. I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a par…

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