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It's interesting seeing all the ChatGPT users in this thread, knowing what we know about OpenAI. Either they don't care about what OpenAI does, don't know their
by mrdependable 6mo ago
It's interesting seeing all the ChatGPT users in this thread, knowing what we know about OpenAI. Either they don't care about what OpenAI does, don't know their reputation, or feel like their use is too insignificant to matter.
- MattGaiser 6mo agoWhat has the tech industry ever resisted on moral or reputational grounds?
- sonofhans 6mo agoThis is sarcastically-stated but an excellent point, and an honest answer will come up with a vanishingly small list. We geeks may think we care about Important Things, but our industry cares for nothing but money and power — morality is a hindrance to the accumulation of those.
- pdntspa 6mo agoWorse, they exploit our curiosity and open-mindedness to build their empires for them. Which we willingly do because cool shiny shit. Nerd-sniping as a weapon of oppression
- MattGaiser 6mo agoA lot of it is simply that they are far more open to the idea of curiousity as having value than most people.
- rcbdev 6mo ago> cool shiny shit You mean absurdly high compensation for very comfortable, low-stress office work? People work to feed their families, not just because working is 'cool'.
- Throaway199999 6mo agollm made this post?
- NewsaHackO 6mo agoBecause of the em-dash? Unfortunately, some writing hipsters created this "uh actually we were writing emdashes first, it's dramatic increase of use since llm proliferation in the 2020s shouldn't mean we can't use it!" movement. This has lead to purposeful use of emdashes to bait people to call them lllms. You can tell because the spaces around it most likely is because they had to copy and paste it from somewhere else as they (like most humans on non macs) don't actually know how to write an emdash otherwise.
- recursive 6mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co4rRptTdQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co4rRptTdQI
- sonofhans 6mo agoWow, that’s some pretty farfetched speculation. I’ve been using double-dash as punctuation since I started writing on a computer in the 1980s. I like that MacOS connects them for me. Consider for a moment how different your assumptions are from reality. Can you learn from that?
- abound 6mo agoOne example I can think of is Google + Project Maven [1], where Google was partnering with the DoD but "withdrew in 2018 after internal protests". Though they've since partnered with the DoD on other initiatives [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Maven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Maven [2] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-department-defense-awards-contracts-google-xai-2025-07-14/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-dep...
- MattGaiser 6mo agoThat is probably the most notable example and in the end, those few still lost.
- burnte 6mo agoMaybe it's time to start.
- selfhoster11 6mo agoThere was Lavabit, though that's an example of just one such event. Edit: and to some extent Apple, at least in the past.
- somenameforme 6mo agoI assume in any sort of thread on a topic like this there is going to be inorganic activity. These companies are all fighting rather hard to try to gain marketshare, potentially worth $trillions, with a product fully capable of producing endless reasonably compelling content to populate an account, a website, or any other basic proof of identity one might ever want. It's probably never been the case that plurality of views meant anything since online is a bubble to begin with, filtered by endless biases wherever we happen to be reading, making it an even more fringe bubble, but the advent of AI has pushed it all over the edge to the point that perceived pluralities are just completely and utterly meaningless. Somewhat depressing for a one who enjoys online chat as a pasttime, but it's the reality of the world now.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 6mo agoYeah yeah yeah, everyone's a bot expect you with all the right opinions...
- Barbing 6mo agohehe :) What's a good way to think about this? Because it does cross my mind about the billions of dollars at play - at the same time, I'm not a pessimist. I think my middle ground is kind of just the usual, taking things with a grain of salt. I mean, I chose to reply to this comment in good faith it's human to human, commenter to unpaid/unaffiliated commenter. I hope I keep that faith. I hope our billions of neighbors on the web enable me to keep that faith over the coming years. Definitely uncertain about the future of the web but want to love it like I've loved it 1990s-today. (Guess I should volunteer w/the EFF while job hunting, try for for-purpose jobs...)
- jmull 6mo agoI don’t know why you dismiss it. There is plenty of astroturfing here, bots and otherwise. I believe the rule around here is to not assume everyone who disagrees with you or has opinions you don’t understand is a shill. Perhaps there’s a bit of that in the post you replied to, but to me seems mostly about mourning the loss of quality conversations online. Gotta say, I agree. Not that things were ever great, but it’s really in the crapper now.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 6mo agoWhat's with the holier-than-thou attitude? Why do you think you're better than someone using chatgpt?
- Morromist 6mo agoIf an AI company has done unethical things do you think it is inappropriate to discuss that? Take Grok: among other things it created sexualized images of underaged women without their consent, not by accident but as a feature. Is that just something you want to ignore? In response the people in charge merely restricted the feature to paid subscribers instead of removing it. Do you think people who mention grok creating CSAM is a holier-than-thou attitude? Do you not think the people who ignore that are worse than other people?
- ThalesX 6mo agoI for one am appalled at TCP/IP because it facilitates so much unethical behavior. I of course am holier than thou because I do not ignore this and am a voice that raises awareness. I shall not be silenced!
- user34283 6mo agoI don't see a comment in this thread concretely discussing said unethical things. Not sure why you felt the need to switch the topic to Grok. About its nudification incident, it seems a bit far stretched to say that malicious actors bypassing its safety controls was not an accident. Initially, the image features were restricted to paying subscribers to prevent abuse by anonymous actors; this obviously happened while they were tightening safety controls to stop abuse. If you're going to bring up that old topic, at least try to get the facts straight.
- Morromist 6mo agoI switched to grok because its a very cut and dry case of an ai company having poor ethics. To me it seems a LOT of a stretch to think that the people behind grok belived their safty controls worked, but you can belive that if you wish. Deepfakes of non-consenting adults were trending on X all the time, elon even appears to have shared them himself, which is pretty bad even if they're all just adults, and I'm sure you belive that they belived the AI could tell the difference between an underage person and an adult perfectly, although it seems clear they didn't test it very much.
- Devasta 6mo agoThe difference between Silicon Valley and Wall Street is that Wall Street knows they are lying when they justify the awful things they do in the name of enriching themselves.
- mootothemax 6mo agoFor what it’s worth, I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription, and every time I try debugging a Linux system issue, I feel sad that Claude is sooooooo confidently bad at it. Claude is noticeably poor for my use case on this particular issue. That said, I imagine I’m not alone in refusing to continue paying OpenAI. We’re in for a wild ride.
- randomNumber7 6mo agoDo you know game theory? If you look at it through this perspective this doesn't sound like a good strategy. Basically the classical prisoner dilemma. The other devs with less moral can then outperform you. It could be a valid strategy if you can increase your crediblity with this relinquishment.
- kakacik 6mo agoLife is more than just empty status games and money hoarding at (almost) all cost. In fact, a good life lived well (TM) is anything but that. But I write this on mostly US forum full of faangs and similar so i dont expect strong agreement.
- jemmyw 6mo agoA lot of folks here will be startup types though, and while there is the idea that you'll make it big, I think day to day people work at startups for the satisfaction.
- randomNumber7 6mo agoSomeone who is never rational is equally bad as someone who claims there is nothing else in humans.
- selfhoster11 6mo agoI am on this very forum as an explicit effort to counterbalance that very view. You have my strong agreement.
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- burnte 6mo agoIf Sam Altman told me what time it was I'd check my watch and probably still not believe him.
- monkeyisland 6mo agoCould you spell it out? I pay a $20/m OpenAI subscription and I haven't read the reasons why I might want to stop.
- freely0085 6mo agohttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...
- Yizahi 6mo agoSam is a pathological liar. He is also trying to build a monopoly which is never a good thing. And finally he is trying to get humans into a binary choice where either there is massive unemployment due to overly successful LLMs resulting in a crisis, or there is a crisis because of the failed LLM expectations. tl;dr: If you need to pay for LLM for work, at least don't pay to the market leader.
- yrds96 6mo agoI don't think people paying for AI at this moment are concerned about moral or ethics.
- Apr1026 6mo agoThere is a saying in India that roughly translates to - Everyone is naked in this bath house. All AI players are 50 shades of evil and are only concerned about their profits. Instead of virtue signaling it's best to use the tools that work best for your needs.
- nickvec 6mo agoThere are varying degrees of evil though. Saying that Anthropic and OpenAI are both "evil" to the same degree is disingenuous (in my opinion) given Altman's sociopathic behavior.
- joquarky 6mo agoYou would have to practically live in a hippie commune to avoid buying products and services from companies led by sociopaths.
- arw0n 6mo agoThis is moral relativism at its finest, and just plain wrong. I'm not willing to go so far as to call Anthropic a good player, but they are surprisingly often willing to put their money where their mouth is. Obviously everything can be interpreted as a PR move as well, but we just lack context to know true intentions. Personally I have repeatedly sold being a good org as a PR move, it is the easiest way to do good in a capitalist environment. The success of such a sales pitch significantly relies on the moral values (or lack thereof) of the other decision makers at the company. With Project Glasswing for example, I'm impressed at how generally well thought out it is, and very much appreciate that they donate a lot of money to OSS. I would have liked them to extend the Project to smaller players as well, but power centralisation is an inherent problem of AI, not something that is unique to Anthropic.
- Yizahi 6mo agoYou are halfway to the correct answer. You are correctly recognizing that evil comes into an infinite spectrum of severity and many actors are evil at different levels at the same time. Now take the next step and recognize that fighting said evil also comes into many different levels of severity. It is not just either clear 100% win or do nothing and immediately resign without a fight. There are many intermediate levels of fight in between two maxima. For example as a small step, one can continue using and paying to LLM corpos, but at least avoid the worst one of them, which OAI objectively is today.
- Yizahi 6mo agoAbsolutely not surprising. Just ask HN users what browser are they using and the answer will be Chrome or Chrome clone in 99% of cases. I even got a reply once along the lines "why do you use Firefox?". I was at a loss for words. I also observe exact same pattern in two different countries among experienced IT workers. They mostly don't care at all about any non-tech implications of the services or employees they are using. Creepto, gambling, tax evasion, supporting monopolies, etc. - all fair game. PS: I'm guilty of the same too, in other areas. But at least I'm selfaware about my transgressions.
- BAHKA 6mo agoGPT user here ;) And Chrome user too :-D I can tell you straight away why I choose Chrome (or Chromium-based browsers) over Firefox. In fact it is very simple reason - speed. Just run Speedometer 3.1 and observe. On my machine Chrome produces around 45, Firefox stucks at 34. MotionMark - the difference is like x3. I have to use very heavy websites on a daily basis (like Salesforce) and I can literally feel the difference.