6 ms·

FWIW here's how I resolve the article's questions currently: 1. Energy usage: Using electricity is not unethical. For many reasons we need to transition Earth

by wilg 2y ago

FWIW here's how I resolve the article's questions currently: 1. Energy usage: Using electricity is not unethical. For many reasons we need to transition Earth to use clean energy. This is not a reason to not use new technology, nor is deep learning particularly wasteful like blockchains are. 2. Training data: Seems reasonable to see AI training as fair use. If you disagree, that's fine too, but the legal specifics of the origin of dataset isn't really fundamental to AI training so we can likely just train only on properly sourced data in some way. Many AI use cases don't have this problem anyway, like self-driving. 3. "Replacing people": I don't think you have a right to continue doing the same work your whole life if someone invents a more efficient way of doing it. We shouldn't build an economy around a busywork jobs guarantee. Plus, it's plausible this concern is a moot point, as Noah Smith argues here https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-the https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-... But I'm happy to do UBI or whatever, though UBI may not be as effective as one would hope. 4. "Incorrect information and bias". Doesn't strike me as a fundamental problem (models will get much better at this), nor an ethical question. Just know the information may be incorrect. Most of it isn't. And LLMs and AI have many use cases beyond retrieving reference information, even if most people just see Google search AI blowing it constantly. 5. Concentrating power: Seems like close-to-state-of-the-art LLMs will be commodified, etc. If it really becomes important I don't see why you couldn't just rustle up some donations for a truly open model or whatever.

ge96 2y ago
Wasn't some offshore wind farm cancelled recently in the US?
- wilg 2y ago
  What would that have to do with what I wrote?
  - ge96 2y ago
    clean energy, my comment though indirect is it sucks (that it was cancelled)
    - wilg 2y ago
      I don't get your point. I support clean energy.
      - LtWorf 2y ago
        But you hate not wasting energy?
        wilg 2y ago
        no, you made that up.
- BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
  I’m pro non-fossil fuel power generation but I have issues with offshore wind. Right now we don’t have good ways of disposing of the turbine blades and the noise does have a negative effect on sea life. I would rather see wind farms on land, so I don’t see this as a bad thing. Ultimately though, I’m pro-nuclear and eager to see what comes of small modular reactors.
  - ge96 2y ago
    Yeah the offshore ones are just massive/make more power I believe and "out of the way" wrt people complaining about their presence
    - BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
      And there’s the added problem of having all this big machinery and electrical equipment atop the ocean, which is the most insidiously corrosive thing on the planet.
moolcool 2y ago
> Many AI use cases don't have this problem anyway, like self-driving. This article is specifically about LLMs
- wilg 2y ago
  Yes, that's why I phrased my answers the way I did.
fhd2 2y ago
To take a tangent off of 3: Automation eliminated art and craft in a lot of areas. Suddenly it's about economies of scale and things get optimised into Good Enough mass products with little to no variety. Consider architecture (bland), clothing (low durability), food (fast food, frozen food, worse nutrition, bland taste) etc etc. Sure, people happily buy all this stuff, it works. But I can't help but feel our stuff is a lot worse than it used to be. I bet I'm not alone. So in that sense, automation has a downside compared to work done by humans that care about their craft and quality. Craft and quality is harder to scale, so we scale mediocre things. Whether or not humans use machines and tools for their work is not the issue. That tools and machines combined with economic pressures lead us down a path of producing worse stuff is. You can look at it through a lense of "if it fulfills the function, who cares". But I for one do prefer having unique, well crafted, quality stuff. But the market pressures work against that. Now my outlook is not as bleak as I make it sound. There's still a lot of quality stuff being made with love. But my point is: Just because we can seemingly meet requirements with the cheapest most scalable approach, doesn't mean it's the best we can do. It's just the most Good Enough we can do.
- wilg 2y ago
  > But I can't help but feel our stuff is a lot worse than it used to be. You are probably wrong though, and you have to consider the benefits of lower cost items in terms of increased availability to the world's poor as well as what saving that money does to allow someone to deploy that money to improve other areas of their life. There is almost certainly a better version of everything available to you at a cheaper price than 50 years ago, and a much cheaper version at a much cheaper price that is almost or about as good that billions of new people now have access to.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  > architecture (bland) This one isn't from automation. There are a lot of compounding reasons, but one primary one for the lack of ornamentation on modern buildings is the use of caulk to speed up the building process (which itself is still generally done by hand), eliminating many of the layered weather-sealing structural elements from previous building styles. > But I can't help but feel our stuff is a lot worse than it used to be. You can still get stuff that's "as good as it used to be" (or rather, as good as the small percentage of items that survived over decades). You're just going to be paying the same kind of prices for that quality, e.g. $500 for a KitchenAid stand mixer or $7000 for a Miele oven.
1053r 2y ago
1) Agree that energy use is ethical. In fact, in so much as higher wealth and income is linked at the societal level to better outcomes such as longer life, lower crime, happier lives, etc., and wealth/income are strongly correlated to energy use, especially once we do the accounting for outsourced manufacturing, I'm willing to go so far as to say that in most circumstances, asking a person to lower their energy use is UNETHICAL. We should, of course, attempt to minimize externalities and harm that come from energy use, like pollution, habitat destruction, etc. Also, just as a thing, not all public blockchains use a ton of energy. Since ETH (the number 2 blockchain) transitioned to proof of stake from proof of work a few years back, it uses practically no energy. Certainly it uses much less than other peer to peer networks, because it processes less data. 2) Agree. 3) Not only is it a good thing to replace jobs or partial jobs with automation, it is the only way that humanity moves forward for the long run! Otherwise, most of us would be dead of childhood diseases and over 90% of the remainder would be working hard manual labor jobs on farms. Certainly we need to practice harm reduction for the job functions and jobs eliminated! But only through automation do we improve materially as a species! (I'm not making a spiritual argument about the value of working on a farm vs a modern life, but material outcomes are much better and improve the more jobs we eliminate!) 4) Many tools have downsides. No tools are in all ways better than the old way of doing things. You learn to live with the bad if it's worth the good. 5) Given the open source nature of many LLMs, the ease with which state of the art LLMs appear to be copied, and the proliferation of various models that have been tuned for various tasks, I would say that LLMS distribute power rather than concentrating it! In other words, the blog is basically wrong on every count.
- kristiandupont 2y ago
  >Not only is it a good thing to replace jobs or partial jobs with automation, it is the only way that humanity moves forward for the long run! The fact that this has been true so far doesn't mean it always will be. It seems perfectly possible to me that there is an actual peak, after which human happiness will decline with increased advancements.
- WhyOhWhyQ 2y ago
  > "Agree that energy use is ethical." Energy use is clearly neither ethical nor unethical in the abstract. > "But only through automation do we improve materially as a species!" Technology is not the only cause of change, and not all changes caused by technology are improvements. I believe the changes caused by LLMs are strict setbacks for humanity as a whole, but we will see.
godot 2y ago
The energy usage concern is also funny in that it doesn't try to compare the energy usage of a human doing the same task (if one were to not use LLM to do the task). If we assume it's true that asking ChatGPT a question costs 3 bottles of water, you should take into account how long that question takes to answer by a human doing the research. If it takes you a couple of hours, you need to include the food and drink intake it takes to power yourself for a couple of hours. If it's anything like beef or almonds it takes way more than 3 bottles of water.
- worldsayshi 2y ago
  I agree, with the addendum that the value of the output should also be considered here - Does the value of the work justify the cost?
- nathell 2y ago
  I don’t think it’s valid; you would have consumed food and drink either way. Plus, you need to verify the output of the LLM anyway.
  - godot 2y ago
    If it takes you 5 minutes to verify the output of the LLM vs 3 hours to do the research work to come to an answer, you saved 2h55m of human time. You would use the 2h55m to do another task. I feel like it is indeed a valid comparison of energy usage.
    - relaxing 2y ago
      How did we go from energy consumed to human time? The caloric needs of a human are minuscule compared to the electricity converted to waste heat to train and operate an LLM.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        > How did we go from energy consumed to human time? Directly. Energy is consumed by humans over time. That time may be spent on doing tasks. Spending that time doing task increases energy consumption over baseline (though humans have substantial energy storage, so, for tasks shorter than couple hours, the cost is usually paid after such tasks). > The caloric needs of a human are minuscule compared to the electricity converted to waste heat to train and operate an LLM. The costs of operating: not really, and that's the whole point of comparison. Sure, humans are energy-efficient in some aspects - but the brains can only do so much. There's plenty of work that LLMs do faster and better than humans, so much better that no human can match them. And speed means more tasks, so energy use per task is lower. Also, if you're talking about cost of operating LLMs in general - i.e. keeping them running and doing arbitrary work, you really need to compare it against costs of keeping a human alive and available to do the work. So it's not just food, but also hygiene - including e.g. delivering water, heating water for laundry and showers, etc. - and similar consumables. As for training costs, that must be a joke. Do you know how much it costs to train a human? Energy or otherwise? As a parent of three kids I'll tell you: a lot. If you include the energy a human uses from birth to ~18, and then energy used while they're trained for whatever jobs you want to compare against AI, then the comparison gets even worse for humans.
eximius 2y ago
> so we can likely just train only on properly sourced data in some way But are we? I _can_ source chocolate and coffee from sources that don't use slave labor, but it becomes very important whether you _are_. You can't just shove the moral implications under the rug because an ethical option _exists_. Obviously this is less extreme than my chocolate/coffee example, but considering this is kinda the point of the questions being asked. 3 & 4 & 5 you just completely disregard as issues?! "3 is not a problem given we do <highly controversial X>" - but what if we don't? "4 is not a problem because we'll just get better" - but what about now when it isn't and what if we don't? "5 is not a problem - just make X available and be rich"
- wilg 2y ago
  I think it's fair to respond to hypothetical problems with hypothetical solutions that I think are plausible and/or likely.
  - dmbche 2y ago
    The problems are not hypothetical.
    - wilg 2y ago
      3, 4, and 5 are
      - camgunz 2y ago
        3. "Replacing people": Just googling reveals this has already happened. 4. "Incorrect information and bias": LLMs famously hallucinate. 5. Concentrating power: Practically no individuals are capable of running, let alone building their own models.
        wilg 2y ago
        I think I've pretty clearly articulated my thoughts on these elements
nashashmi 2y ago
Using any resource without care is unethical. It doesn’t matter how abundant or free it is. We don't have infinite resources. And using AI unnecessarily or inefficiently or abusively is a waste of resource and therefore unethical. Information is a resource. And bottling it up is unethical. Eliminating people means freeing up resources. So that is ethical. Firing people is unethical. Designate people for other tasks. Bad resources are the responsibility of the person who uses it. Taking shortcuts is unethical. Concentration of resources is unethical. My reflection on AI is from the perspective of resource management. Ethics should be concerned with waste.
dnissley 2y ago
I try to challenge people's concerns with 1 in an even stronger way: We're seeing evidence that the future power needs of AI may drive our civilization to start a revolution in high tech green energy, such as nuclear. If the power needs of AI end up being 10x the power needs of all other uses for that power, and we satisfy that power requirement using nuclear, then it will be much much easier to phase out heavy polluting sources of energy.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Yup. Using energy is not unethical on its own. And even with the climate crisis, if anything history tells us about how humanity works (which is not something that's going to change any time soon), the best way out of the crisis involves using even more energy.
hrkucuk 2y ago
1. Consuming something that has an impact on the environment is an ethical issue. And I think it is unethical in this case. They are coming up with a power hungry system that consumes large amounts of energy—and they are doing it for profits. I think we can agree that they don't really have any desire to give back to the environment for what they consume. You might ask, was industrial revolution's impact on environment unethical, despite where it brought us? Of course it was unethical! If we had the opportunity to go back in time and make it better, we would! Except of course profit hungry people would still find ways to circumvent our new policies, and gain an economic edge over competitors by consuming more energy and thus, again, harming the environment. The same is happening with LLMs. People who seek profit are even building their own grids which generate electricity by burning fuel, just to run their data centers. They don't care about the impact it has on the environment in which we all live, and that is unethical. And what if the need of power will bring about new tech that will allow green energy much more efficiently? Like fusion reactors that work. Sure, nobody is stopping you to develop those! But you cannot take a bet on people's, animals' and plants' well being and "have confidence" that it will all work out in the end! You cannot take a bet on people's lives for a promised future. Who has such a right? What an entitlement... There is only one way to make this ethical: Will you take accountability on your shoulders, if it all fails? Then go be my guest. But no, if it all goes down, and instead we end up with a dystopian AI that can mass control everybody, and washed up shores and a world that became a desert, then every single person who has been responsible for the mess will go be free, while some innocent scapegoats will take the toll. So no, personally I am not giving consent for profit seeking people to take a bet on my planet's future. 2. If you can see the data with your eyes, then you should be able to train an AI with it. However when you commercialize your AI and chant non-stop about how all the writers and artists who contributed to your AI model were nothing other than a stepping stone for you to create your model, it turns into an attitude that is unethical. But the owners of the model spend billions of dollars to train the models, so shouldn't they have the right to sell it? Well, if they had any _morals_, they could train smaller models patiently that could be build on nothing other than a research's fund. Then we could have developed bit quantization to make it cheaper. Then we could have come up with better models by distilling them to make the LLMs better and so on. But no, there are profits to be made and no time to loose! These needless ethics shall not hinder the progress (of making as much money as possible as soon as possible)... 3. Progress in tech will inevitably bring about disrupting changes to the society. I also see no problem with this. However I must point that, pro-AI people have a disrespect for people's hard earned skills. I sense a grudge in these people that they really want AI's to nullify people's skills, skills that they themselves are too lazy to develop. In AI marketing, I also sense a similar strategy, i.e. their selling point is "now everybody can become an artist"... No, they can't. In my opinion this point has less to do with ethics. Overtime we will all see whether these models live up to the hype. At the end the natural cycle of life will sort itself out. 4. I don't see your point. I think it is both a fundamental problem and an ethical issue. Let me explain. Imagine that there is an ultimate Truth to something. We don't know what it is, but we have an idea about it. Now imagine that you are a bad actor who wished ill on people. You develop smart sounding propaganda to steer public opinion away from the Truth. An LLM with bias is exactly that. So it is an ethical problem. It is also a fundamental problem, that is, whether AI gives correct or incorrect answer. If it is giving incorrect answers, then it is unremarkable. Currently, as far as my observations go, LLM's generate both (1) grammatically correct sentences and (2) sentences that seem contextually accurate. Whether the content of their saying are correct or not, really seems to be depending on how much of the requested Truth already exists in the Internet. So great, we invented a system that can recycle what is said on the Internet. Don't get me wrong: I do think that it is a great advance in information processing, linguistics and machine learning. But for some reason, we don't seem to be ready to acknowledge it's shortcomings as a serious problem. Instead, there seems to be a general opinion that "it will get better". No, the thing is that, if it hits a point in development where it generates enough value for the commercial companies, we will end up with a smart sounding propaganda machine that can control uninformed masses in a scale that was unimaginable even for the most pessimistic person. 5. -> Seems like close-to-state-of-the-art LLMs will be commodified, etc. The reason why I don't like your attitude is because of this. Yes, indeed, models will be developed by the open source crowd and will be in the hands of many. Surely progress in tech will bring about this. And yet. This has nothing to do with what the author is saying. She is saying that _these LLMs_ made by _these companies_ (you know which ones we are talking about) will be used to concentrate power. Commodification of other models does not negate her point. -> If it really becomes important I don't see why you couldn't just rustle up some donations for a truly open model or whatever. I will shut up about this point when _it happens_. Until then, people who agree with me must keep bringing these issues to people's attention. AI has been used for controlling masses long before LLMs. Now it has been supercharged by LLMs because they can interpret human language pretty well. Therefore I think the blog post's author has a good point on this issue. Overall I see hand waiving and weak dismissal of her points.
t0bia_s 2y ago
UBI is perfect tool to make citizens obedient to government. Collectivism in history showed how deadly centrally planned economy is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosplan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosplan

by wilg 2y ago

ge96 2y ago

Wasn't some offshore wind farm cancelled recently in the US?

wilg 2y ago
What would that have to do with what I wrote?
- ge96 2y ago
  clean energy, my comment though indirect is it sucks (that it was cancelled)
  - wilg 2y ago
    I don't get your point. I support clean energy.
    - LtWorf 2y ago
      But you hate not wasting energy?
      - wilg 2y ago
        no, you made that up.
BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
I’m pro non-fossil fuel power generation but I have issues with offshore wind. Right now we don’t have good ways of disposing of the turbine blades and the noise does have a negative effect on sea life. I would rather see wind farms on land, so I don’t see this as a bad thing. Ultimately though, I’m pro-nuclear and eager to see what comes of small modular reactors.
- ge96 2y ago
  Yeah the offshore ones are just massive/make more power I believe and "out of the way" wrt people complaining about their presence
  - BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
    And there’s the added problem of having all this big machinery and electrical equipment atop the ocean, which is the most insidiously corrosive thing on the planet.

moolcool 2y ago

> Many AI use cases don't have this problem anyway, like self-driving. This article is specifically about LLMs

wilg 2y ago
Yes, that's why I phrased my answers the way I did.

fhd2 2y ago

To take a tangent off of 3: Automation eliminated art and craft in a lot of areas. Suddenly it's about economies of scale and things get optimised into Good Enough mass products with little to no variety. Consider architecture (bland), clothing (low durability), food (fast food, frozen food, worse nutrition, bland taste) etc etc. Sure, people happily buy all this stuff, it works. But I can't help but feel our stuff is a lot worse than it used to be. I bet I'm not alone. So in that sense, automation has a downside compared to work done by humans that care about their craft and quality. Craft and quality is harder to scale, so we scale mediocre things. Whether or not humans use machines and tools for their work is not the issue. That tools and machines combined with economic pressures lead us down a path of producing worse stuff is. You can look at it through a lense of "if it fulfills the function, who cares". But I for one do prefer having unique, well crafted, quality stuff. But the market pressures work against that. Now my outlook is not as bleak as I make it sound. There's still a lot of quality stuff being made with love. But my point is: Just because we can seemingly meet requirements with the cheapest most scalable approach, doesn't mean it's the best we can do. It's just the most Good Enough we can do.

wilg 2y ago
> But I can't help but feel our stuff is a lot worse than it used to be. You are probably wrong though, and you have to consider the benefits of lower cost items in terms of increased availability to the world's poor as well as what saving that money does to allow someone to deploy that money to improve other areas of their life. There is almost certainly a better version of everything available to you at a cheaper price than 50 years ago, and a much cheaper version at a much cheaper price that is almost or about as good that billions of new people now have access to.
crooked-v 2y ago
> architecture (bland) This one isn't from automation. There are a lot of compounding reasons, but one primary one for the lack of ornamentation on modern buildings is the use of caulk to speed up the building process (which itself is still generally done by hand), eliminating many of the layered weather-sealing structural elements from previous building styles. > But I can't help but feel our stuff is a lot worse than it used to be. You can still get stuff that's "as good as it used to be" (or rather, as good as the small percentage of items that survived over decades). You're just going to be paying the same kind of prices for that quality, e.g. $500 for a KitchenAid stand mixer or $7000 for a Miele oven.

1053r 2y ago

1) Agree that energy use is ethical. In fact, in so much as higher wealth and income is linked at the societal level to better outcomes such as longer life, lower crime, happier lives, etc., and wealth/income are strongly correlated to energy use, especially once we do the accounting for outsourced manufacturing, I'm willing to go so far as to say that in most circumstances, asking a person to lower their energy use is UNETHICAL. We should, of course, attempt to minimize externalities and harm that come from energy use, like pollution, habitat destruction, etc. Also, just as a thing, not all public blockchains use a ton of energy. Since ETH (the number 2 blockchain) transitioned to proof of stake from proof of work a few years back, it uses practically no energy. Certainly it uses much less than other peer to peer networks, because it processes less data. 2) Agree. 3) Not only is it a good thing to replace jobs or partial jobs with automation, it is the only way that humanity moves forward for the long run! Otherwise, most of us would be dead of childhood diseases and over 90% of the remainder would be working hard manual labor jobs on farms. Certainly we need to practice harm reduction for the job functions and jobs eliminated! But only through automation do we improve materially as a species! (I'm not making a spiritual argument about the value of working on a farm vs a modern life, but material outcomes are much better and improve the more jobs we eliminate!) 4) Many tools have downsides. No tools are in all ways better than the old way of doing things. You learn to live with the bad if it's worth the good. 5) Given the open source nature of many LLMs, the ease with which state of the art LLMs appear to be copied, and the proliferation of various models that have been tuned for various tasks, I would say that LLMS distribute power rather than concentrating it! In other words, the blog is basically wrong on every count.

kristiandupont 2y ago
>Not only is it a good thing to replace jobs or partial jobs with automation, it is the only way that humanity moves forward for the long run! The fact that this has been true so far doesn't mean it always will be. It seems perfectly possible to me that there is an actual peak, after which human happiness will decline with increased advancements.
WhyOhWhyQ 2y ago
> "Agree that energy use is ethical." Energy use is clearly neither ethical nor unethical in the abstract. > "But only through automation do we improve materially as a species!" Technology is not the only cause of change, and not all changes caused by technology are improvements. I believe the changes caused by LLMs are strict setbacks for humanity as a whole, but we will see.

godot 2y ago

The energy usage concern is also funny in that it doesn't try to compare the energy usage of a human doing the same task (if one were to not use LLM to do the task). If we assume it's true that asking ChatGPT a question costs 3 bottles of water, you should take into account how long that question takes to answer by a human doing the research. If it takes you a couple of hours, you need to include the food and drink intake it takes to power yourself for a couple of hours. If it's anything like beef or almonds it takes way more than 3 bottles of water.

worldsayshi 2y ago
I agree, with the addendum that the value of the output should also be considered here - Does the value of the work justify the cost?
nathell 2y ago
I don’t think it’s valid; you would have consumed food and drink either way. Plus, you need to verify the output of the LLM anyway.
- godot 2y ago
  If it takes you 5 minutes to verify the output of the LLM vs 3 hours to do the research work to come to an answer, you saved 2h55m of human time. You would use the 2h55m to do another task. I feel like it is indeed a valid comparison of energy usage.
  - relaxing 2y ago
    How did we go from energy consumed to human time? The caloric needs of a human are minuscule compared to the electricity converted to waste heat to train and operate an LLM.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > How did we go from energy consumed to human time? Directly. Energy is consumed by humans over time. That time may be spent on doing tasks. Spending that time doing task increases energy consumption over baseline (though humans have substantial energy storage, so, for tasks shorter than couple hours, the cost is usually paid after such tasks). > The caloric needs of a human are minuscule compared to the electricity converted to waste heat to train and operate an LLM. The costs of operating: not really, and that's the whole point of comparison. Sure, humans are energy-efficient in some aspects - but the brains can only do so much. There's plenty of work that LLMs do faster and better than humans, so much better that no human can match them. And speed means more tasks, so energy use per task is lower. Also, if you're talking about cost of operating LLMs in general - i.e. keeping them running and doing arbitrary work, you really need to compare it against costs of keeping a human alive and available to do the work. So it's not just food, but also hygiene - including e.g. delivering water, heating water for laundry and showers, etc. - and similar consumables. As for training costs, that must be a joke. Do you know how much it costs to train a human? Energy or otherwise? As a parent of three kids I'll tell you: a lot. If you include the energy a human uses from birth to ~18, and then energy used while they're trained for whatever jobs you want to compare against AI, then the comparison gets even worse for humans.

eximius 2y ago

> so we can likely just train only on properly sourced data in some way But are we? I _can_ source chocolate and coffee from sources that don't use slave labor, but it becomes very important whether you _are_. You can't just shove the moral implications under the rug because an ethical option _exists_. Obviously this is less extreme than my chocolate/coffee example, but considering this is kinda the point of the questions being asked. 3 & 4 & 5 you just completely disregard as issues?! "3 is not a problem given we do <highly controversial X>" - but what if we don't? "4 is not a problem because we'll just get better" - but what about now when it isn't and what if we don't? "5 is not a problem - just make X available and be rich"

wilg 2y ago
I think it's fair to respond to hypothetical problems with hypothetical solutions that I think are plausible and/or likely.
- dmbche 2y ago
  The problems are not hypothetical.
  - wilg 2y ago
    3, 4, and 5 are
    - camgunz 2y ago
      3. "Replacing people": Just googling reveals this has already happened. 4. "Incorrect information and bias": LLMs famously hallucinate. 5. Concentrating power: Practically no individuals are capable of running, let alone building their own models.
      - wilg 2y ago
        I think I've pretty clearly articulated my thoughts on these elements

nashashmi 2y ago

Using any resource without care is unethical. It doesn’t matter how abundant or free it is. We don't have infinite resources. And using AI unnecessarily or inefficiently or abusively is a waste of resource and therefore unethical. Information is a resource. And bottling it up is unethical. Eliminating people means freeing up resources. So that is ethical. Firing people is unethical. Designate people for other tasks. Bad resources are the responsibility of the person who uses it. Taking shortcuts is unethical. Concentration of resources is unethical. My reflection on AI is from the perspective of resource management. Ethics should be concerned with waste.

dnissley 2y ago

I try to challenge people's concerns with 1 in an even stronger way: We're seeing evidence that the future power needs of AI may drive our civilization to start a revolution in high tech green energy, such as nuclear. If the power needs of AI end up being 10x the power needs of all other uses for that power, and we satisfy that power requirement using nuclear, then it will be much much easier to phase out heavy polluting sources of energy.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Yup. Using energy is not unethical on its own. And even with the climate crisis, if anything history tells us about how humanity works (which is not something that's going to change any time soon), the best way out of the crisis involves using even more energy.

hrkucuk 2y ago

1. Consuming something that has an impact on the environment is an ethical issue. And I think it is unethical in this case. They are coming up with a power hungry system that consumes large amounts of energy—and they are doing it for profits. I think we can agree that they don't really have any desire to give back to the environment for what they consume. You might ask, was industrial revolution's impact on environment unethical, despite where it brought us? Of course it was unethical! If we had the opportunity to go back in time and make it better, we would! Except of course profit hungry people would still find ways to circumvent our new policies, and gain an economic edge over competitors by consuming more energy and thus, again, harming the environment. The same is happening with LLMs. People who seek profit are even building their own grids which generate electricity by burning fuel, just to run their data centers. They don't care about the impact it has on the environment in which we all live, and that is unethical. And what if the need of power will bring about new tech that will allow green energy much more efficiently? Like fusion reactors that work. Sure, nobody is stopping you to develop those! But you cannot take a bet on people's, animals' and plants' well being and "have confidence" that it will all work out in the end! You cannot take a bet on people's lives for a promised future. Who has such a right? What an entitlement... There is only one way to make this ethical: Will you take accountability on your shoulders, if it all fails? Then go be my guest. But no, if it all goes down, and instead we end up with a dystopian AI that can mass control everybody, and washed up shores and a world that became a desert, then every single person who has been responsible for the mess will go be free, while some innocent scapegoats will take the toll. So no, personally I am not giving consent for profit seeking people to take a bet on my planet's future. 2. If you can see the data with your eyes, then you should be able to train an AI with it. However when you commercialize your AI and chant non-stop about how all the writers and artists who contributed to your AI model were nothing other than a stepping stone for you to create your model, it turns into an attitude that is unethical. But the owners of the model spend billions of dollars to train the models, so shouldn't they have the right to sell it? Well, if they had any _morals_, they could train smaller models patiently that could be build on nothing other than a research's fund. Then we could have developed bit quantization to make it cheaper. Then we could have come up with better models by distilling them to make the LLMs better and so on. But no, there are profits to be made and no time to loose! These needless ethics shall not hinder the progress (of making as much money as possible as soon as possible)... 3. Progress in tech will inevitably bring about disrupting changes to the society. I also see no problem with this. However I must point that, pro-AI people have a disrespect for people's hard earned skills. I sense a grudge in these people that they really want AI's to nullify people's skills, skills that they themselves are too lazy to develop. In AI marketing, I also sense a similar strategy, i.e. their selling point is "now everybody can become an artist"... No, they can't. In my opinion this point has less to do with ethics. Overtime we will all see whether these models live up to the hype. At the end the natural cycle of life will sort itself out. 4. I don't see your point. I think it is both a fundamental problem and an ethical issue. Let me explain. Imagine that there is an ultimate Truth to something. We don't know what it is, but we have an idea about it. Now imagine that you are a bad actor who wished ill on people. You develop smart sounding propaganda to steer public opinion away from the Truth. An LLM with bias is exactly that. So it is an ethical problem. It is also a fundamental problem, that is, whether AI gives correct or incorrect answer. If it is giving incorrect answers, then it is unremarkable. Currently, as far as my observations go, LLM's generate both (1) grammatically correct sentences and (2) sentences that seem contextually accurate. Whether the content of their saying are correct or not, really seems to be depending on how much of the requested Truth already exists in the Internet. So great, we invented a system that can recycle what is said on the Internet. Don't get me wrong: I do think that it is a great advance in information processing, linguistics and machine learning. But for some reason, we don't seem to be ready to acknowledge it's shortcomings as a serious problem. Instead, there seems to be a general opinion that "it will get better". No, the thing is that, if it hits a point in development where it generates enough value for the commercial companies, we will end up with a smart sounding propaganda machine that can control uninformed masses in a scale that was unimaginable even for the most pessimistic person. 5. -> Seems like close-to-state-of-the-art LLMs will be commodified, etc. The reason why I don't like your attitude is because of this. Yes, indeed, models will be developed by the open source crowd and will be in the hands of many. Surely progress in tech will bring about this. And yet. This has nothing to do with what the author is saying. She is saying that _these LLMs_ made by _these companies_ (you know which ones we are talking about) will be used to concentrate power. Commodification of other models does not negate her point. -> If it really becomes important I don't see why you couldn't just rustle up some donations for a truly open model or whatever. I will shut up about this point when _it happens_. Until then, people who agree with me must keep bringing these issues to people's attention. AI has been used for controlling masses long before LLMs. Now it has been supercharged by LLMs because they can interpret human language pretty well. Therefore I think the blog post's author has a good point on this issue. Overall I see hand waiving and weak dismissal of her points.

t0bia_s 2y ago

UBI is perfect tool to make citizens obedient to government. Collectivism in history showed how deadly centrally planned economy is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosplan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosplan