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> Sounds to me like you've decided that AI veganism is not for you! I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not s

> Sounds to me like you've decided that AI veganism is not for you! I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker. > I've thought about this comparison to human artists taking inspiration from each other a bit. The problem becomes the scale. A human artist can't look at 5bn images and use them to be able to instantly mimic the style of another artist, hundreds of times an hour. A human can mimic something with a single reference. It might not be good, but that can hardly matter for a discussion of ethics. The morality cannot depend on whether or not humans can do something poorly or not. > Consider facial recognition technology. At an individual level, empowering people to quickly see all of the photos they have taken of their spouse through running facial recognition against their photos is useful and harmless. Allowing governments to run the exact same technology against every photo uploaded to Facebook is a massively harmful expansion of the surveillance state. Entirely different issue that happens to utilize a similar tech. > But this example does show that things that are fine on a small scale can be harmful at a big scale. It does not.

bowsamic 4y ago
> I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker. I agree. This would more accurately be called "AI Luddism", opposing a new technology because of fears related to its immense productivity over humans. It has nothing to do with veganism EDIT: that said, vegan is used in the sense of the article as "a really obvious and strong stance that people do not follow even though all the information about how it is bad is readily available"
- simonw 4y ago
  I think calling it "AI Luddism" would offend people who are opposed to generative AI a lot more than calling it "AI veganism" offends vegans.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    Why? The argument is very similar to the one that Luddites used: that the increased efficiency is harmful to artists
    - simonw 4y ago
      Try even hinting at calling them Luddites and see how they react!
      - bowsamic 4y ago
        So basically, they want to be called vegans, because that's a historically virtuous label, but not Luddites, because that's a historically maligned one? Even though they are literally not vegans, and literally are much closer to Luddites?
    - forgotusername6 4y ago
      The argument is slightly different. This isn't about taking away a person's job. This is about eroding something that we as humans had previously thought was uniquely ours, intellectual creativity. The point of art was to express something by humans for other humans. The point was not to make a pretty picture, or a pleasant sounding song. When an AI does this it is and likely always will be a mere imitation of what art is supposed to be. The sad thing is that this imitation will be good enough and cheap enough that it will flood our daily lives. AI image and song generation will do what mobile did to computer games. Endless piles of low effort useless output and concepts distilled to the smallest possible set of features necessary for us to be suckered into purchasing them.
      - bowsamic 4y ago
        Is the argument of Luddism not also the erosion of transforming material things with your hands, something we also thought was uniquely human?
      - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
        As more labor was automated, these exact arguments were made. It was thought that no machine could capture the beauty and skill of human craftsmen as creation was a fundamentally human task. It was thought to be "sad" that low-effort, mass-produced, standardized goods would be "good enough" to satisfy human needs, that there was some inextricable timeless beauty to human output that elevates over machine output. Time has shown us that machine output has become even more precise and skillful than human labor. These arguments feel almost 1:1. At times this whole thing feels hypocritical. Generations of laborers grew up with the reality that their work was essentially a commodity. Now that it's our turn, we raise the age old arguments again.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  That's not really what Luddites were about though. They were poor people in a reactionary and anti-democratic country, that was fighting (and winning) wars to stop democracy spreading while people at home starved: https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/17/napoleon-dream-died-waterloo-200th-anniversary-triumph-reaction https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/17/napoleon-d... > In one conversation on St Helena, Napoleon was asked by his doctor what he would have done if he had managed to invade southern England in 1805. Napoleon’s reply was an absolute cracker: “I would have hastened over my flotilla with two hundred thousand men, landed as near Chatham as possible and proceeded direct to London, where I calculated to arrive in four days from the time of my landing. I would have proclaimed a republic and the abolition of the nobility and the House of Peers, the distribution of the property of such of the latter as opposed me amongst my partisans, liberty, equality and the sovereignty of the people.” They smashed machines because that hurt the people oppressing them, not because they hated the machines.
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    Britain at the time wasn't as democratic as it is today certainly, but it was far more democratic than Napoleon's Empire that it was fighting against. Napoleon liked to pretend that he defended the French Revolution's ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, but in fact he went around creating new kingdoms and making his relatives monarchs.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      I wasn't really trying to make the case that Napolean was a great guy, but he rose to power by winning battles in a war between the French Republic and a bunch of Monarchies, so there was a fairly clear democratic side. Admittedly, the UK was warring againt the French Monach as well before, so it's not a clear cut thing, but things like Luddites and the 'Peterloo' show that Britain was not speeding towards greater democracy. They very slowly gave ground over centuries of struggle. > The Tory Prime Minister in 1830, Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington, was resolutely opposed to parliamentary reform. However, there was growing support for limited change within his party, primarily because partially extending the franchise would allow the wealth and influence of Britain's growing middle class to be exploited. That's 20 years later, a small extra step of democracy. I was just trying to point out that smashing some stuff was a fairly reasonable thing to do when you don't have a vote and you're hungry, by providing some political context on the era.
simonw 4y ago
I agree that this analogy is (mildly) insulting to veganism. This is another example of an ethical choice that I made! Is the harm here that is caused by being offensive to veganism outweighed by the value of sparking useful conversations about personal approaches to AI ethics? I think that it is. It's similar to the ethics of attaching a click-bait headline to a valuable piece of journalism. Is it OK to do that? That depends, both on the specific case and on the opinions of individuals who observe that decision.
- chrispine 4y ago
  Seems like a disproportionate number of these comments are about using the vegan analogy. So setting aside offense or ethics, do you think it was a good idea to go with this analogy, or is it detracting from "the value of sparking useful conversations about personal approaches to AI ethics"? (emphasis mine)
  - simonw 4y ago
    I've been trying unsuccessfully to have good conversations about AI ethics for quite a while. This thread has 59 comments, and more than half of them aren't about veganism - so yeah, I think it worked. And to be honest, if it hadn't worked I would have thought "well, it was worth a shot". The analogy genuinely works well for me.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kixiQu 4y ago
> I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker. There are many, many, many people out there who believe it's fine to eat meat but not fine to e.g. feign attribution on intellectual work. Asserting that objections to this kind of tech are much weaker than various vegan arguments without explanation is odd. > A human can mimic something with a single reference. It might not be good, but that can hardly matter for a discussion of ethics. The morality cannot depend on whether or not humans can do something poorly or not. Asserting this without argument suggests you have a particular unstated idea of how ethical determinations are supposed to be made that you are projecting out onto the discussion. This would be important to lay out.
- andreilys 4y ago
  Murdering (or being complicit in the factory farming model), and then consuming another living conscious being is on a very different moral plane than remixing intellectual work. It's hard to imagine the mental gymnastics required to think the two are in the same league.
  - kixiQu 4y ago
    Deciding that "living conscious being" is the category that merits moral status is one framework of justification for veganism – the Western originated-in-the-1970s-one. https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/rights/moralstatus_1.shtml https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/rights/moralstatus_1.sh... I'm not saying that it's wrong, but to act like it should be taken as the default prior without requiring laying out its context is a very narrow view.
  - trention 4y ago
    >It's hard to imagine the mental gymnastics required to think the two are in the same league. It's really not hard. You just have to care more for the harm to the well-being of human artists than for the harm for the well-being of farmed animals. It may surprise some people but speciesism is the default position for the vast majority of the population.

bowsamic 4y ago

> I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker. I agree. This would more accurately be called "AI Luddism", opposing a new technology because of fears related to its immense productivity over humans. It has nothing to do with veganism EDIT: that said, vegan is used in the sense of the article as "a really obvious and strong stance that people do not follow even though all the information about how it is bad is readily available"

simonw 4y ago
I think calling it "AI Luddism" would offend people who are opposed to generative AI a lot more than calling it "AI veganism" offends vegans.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  Why? The argument is very similar to the one that Luddites used: that the increased efficiency is harmful to artists
  - simonw 4y ago
    Try even hinting at calling them Luddites and see how they react!
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      So basically, they want to be called vegans, because that's a historically virtuous label, but not Luddites, because that's a historically maligned one? Even though they are literally not vegans, and literally are much closer to Luddites?
  - forgotusername6 4y ago
    The argument is slightly different. This isn't about taking away a person's job. This is about eroding something that we as humans had previously thought was uniquely ours, intellectual creativity. The point of art was to express something by humans for other humans. The point was not to make a pretty picture, or a pleasant sounding song. When an AI does this it is and likely always will be a mere imitation of what art is supposed to be. The sad thing is that this imitation will be good enough and cheap enough that it will flood our daily lives. AI image and song generation will do what mobile did to computer games. Endless piles of low effort useless output and concepts distilled to the smallest possible set of features necessary for us to be suckered into purchasing them.
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      Is the argument of Luddism not also the erosion of transforming material things with your hands, something we also thought was uniquely human?
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      As more labor was automated, these exact arguments were made. It was thought that no machine could capture the beauty and skill of human craftsmen as creation was a fundamentally human task. It was thought to be "sad" that low-effort, mass-produced, standardized goods would be "good enough" to satisfy human needs, that there was some inextricable timeless beauty to human output that elevates over machine output. Time has shown us that machine output has become even more precise and skillful than human labor. These arguments feel almost 1:1. At times this whole thing feels hypocritical. Generations of laborers grew up with the reality that their work was essentially a commodity. Now that it's our turn, we raise the age old arguments again.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
That's not really what Luddites were about though. They were poor people in a reactionary and anti-democratic country, that was fighting (and winning) wars to stop democracy spreading while people at home starved: https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/17/napoleon-dream-died-waterloo-200th-anniversary-triumph-reaction https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/17/napoleon-d... > In one conversation on St Helena, Napoleon was asked by his doctor what he would have done if he had managed to invade southern England in 1805. Napoleon’s reply was an absolute cracker: “I would have hastened over my flotilla with two hundred thousand men, landed as near Chatham as possible and proceeded direct to London, where I calculated to arrive in four days from the time of my landing. I would have proclaimed a republic and the abolition of the nobility and the House of Peers, the distribution of the property of such of the latter as opposed me amongst my partisans, liberty, equality and the sovereignty of the people.” They smashed machines because that hurt the people oppressing them, not because they hated the machines.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  Britain at the time wasn't as democratic as it is today certainly, but it was far more democratic than Napoleon's Empire that it was fighting against. Napoleon liked to pretend that he defended the French Revolution's ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, but in fact he went around creating new kingdoms and making his relatives monarchs.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    I wasn't really trying to make the case that Napolean was a great guy, but he rose to power by winning battles in a war between the French Republic and a bunch of Monarchies, so there was a fairly clear democratic side. Admittedly, the UK was warring againt the French Monach as well before, so it's not a clear cut thing, but things like Luddites and the 'Peterloo' show that Britain was not speeding towards greater democracy. They very slowly gave ground over centuries of struggle. > The Tory Prime Minister in 1830, Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington, was resolutely opposed to parliamentary reform. However, there was growing support for limited change within his party, primarily because partially extending the franchise would allow the wealth and influence of Britain's growing middle class to be exploited. That's 20 years later, a small extra step of democracy. I was just trying to point out that smashing some stuff was a fairly reasonable thing to do when you don't have a vote and you're hungry, by providing some political context on the era.

simonw 4y ago

I agree that this analogy is (mildly) insulting to veganism. This is another example of an ethical choice that I made! Is the harm here that is caused by being offensive to veganism outweighed by the value of sparking useful conversations about personal approaches to AI ethics? I think that it is. It's similar to the ethics of attaching a click-bait headline to a valuable piece of journalism. Is it OK to do that? That depends, both on the specific case and on the opinions of individuals who observe that decision.

chrispine 4y ago
Seems like a disproportionate number of these comments are about using the vegan analogy. So setting aside offense or ethics, do you think it was a good idea to go with this analogy, or is it detracting from "the value of sparking useful conversations about personal approaches to AI ethics"? (emphasis mine)
- simonw 4y ago
  I've been trying unsuccessfully to have good conversations about AI ethics for quite a while. This thread has 59 comments, and more than half of them aren't about veganism - so yeah, I think it worked. And to be honest, if it hadn't worked I would have thought "well, it was worth a shot". The analogy genuinely works well for me.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

kixiQu 4y ago

> I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker. There are many, many, many people out there who believe it's fine to eat meat but not fine to e.g. feign attribution on intellectual work. Asserting that objections to this kind of tech are much weaker than various vegan arguments without explanation is odd. > A human can mimic something with a single reference. It might not be good, but that can hardly matter for a discussion of ethics. The morality cannot depend on whether or not humans can do something poorly or not. Asserting this without argument suggests you have a particular unstated idea of how ethical determinations are supposed to be made that you are projecting out onto the discussion. This would be important to lay out.

andreilys 4y ago
Murdering (or being complicit in the factory farming model), and then consuming another living conscious being is on a very different moral plane than remixing intellectual work. It's hard to imagine the mental gymnastics required to think the two are in the same league.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  Deciding that "living conscious being" is the category that merits moral status is one framework of justification for veganism – the Western originated-in-the-1970s-one. https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/rights/moralstatus_1.shtml https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/rights/moralstatus_1.sh... I'm not saying that it's wrong, but to act like it should be taken as the default prior without requiring laying out its context is a very narrow view.
- trention 4y ago
  >It's hard to imagine the mental gymnastics required to think the two are in the same league. It's really not hard. You just have to care more for the harm to the well-being of human artists than for the harm for the well-being of farmed animals. It may surprise some people but speciesism is the default position for the vast majority of the population.