A lot of us here hate AI because of how it was built: training data gathered without the creators’ explicit, opt-in consent, data centers that negatively affect communities’ access to clean water and energy, a technology design that is inherently prone to hallucinations, etc. At least, those are the main reasons why I hate it.

I think I might actually want to support an AI project if I thought it was being done right. Maybe we could get more people away from exploitative models if there was a non-exploitative alternative.

So what would it take to build AI ethically, in your opinion? And do you know of anyone trying to build AI without these issues?

  • Hetare King@piefed.socialEnglish
    20·
    2 days ago

    I consider these to be the main ethical issues with specifically LLMs and generative AI in general:

    1. Using people’s work as training data without consent.
    2. The high cost of training a model meaning that only a few entities in the world can actually do so and so, only few people get to decide what the knowledge base and “slant” of the model is. This is true even for open source models.
    3. The high resource cost of using a model relative to the value of its output.
    4. People with malicious intent being empowered by it far, far more than anyone else.
    5. The model producing the response to the query directly instead of leading to the source, leaving both the source without any way to benefit and the user from having any context queues they can use to verify the reliability of the information.
    6. Infinite and automated production of misinformation, libel and psychological manipulation.
    7. Inducing psychosis in people.

    Point 1 can be resolved by the people training AI just making different choices. Many won’t unless they’re forced to, but in principle they could.

    Points 2 and 3 could hypothetically be resolved in the future with better technology.

    The rest are basically inherent to the technology and you can at best try and mostly fail to reduce the risk. So as far I’m concerned, what it would take to build AI ethically is to train it for very specific purposes and have it be used as statistical models by people who know what they’re doing.

    Though I do see some potential for ethical LLMs by using them to perform vector searches instead of generating text, basically turning them into smarter search engines.