Hello All,
One of the biggest pressure points around AI right now is ethics. There are multiple measures of that ‘ethics’ debate. We have:
- Generative AI – LLM and Image/Video AI being trained on “unconsenting” data
- Generative AI – Replacing human creative workers
- AI LLMs in general – power and water demands, in both a local scope and a global one
I’m undertaking this project, with the intent to show off many of the ways the ways we can use AI tools to help technology companies.
This does prevent me with ethical challenges, as I do agree that much training happens using data in ways that does not meet the right threshold for data consumption in the way they have. I particularly dislike generative AI when it is used to replace valuable human creativity, and unethical (often just thoughtless) use of it could be argued to be poisoning history, burning the planet, and decreasing our overall mental health.
For now, I have to treat this the same way I do parenting. There are many, many wrong ways to parent – and they’re all around us. There are many ways to thoughtlessly harm while parenting. I can only do best by my kids, helping guide them (and by reflection, those are around them). I, too, loathe that social media has become a Bot Empire, and that search results are becoming more and more poisoned.
How this applies to my use of AI: I will be showing how to do many things with AI, yes. I can’t NOT use an existing model, nor can I reduce the power/water consumption. But I can continue to raise pressure in the industry to address what the IEEE and OECD talked about, which is encouraging regulations to add more measures in place to ensure good data can be collected to produce minimal harm outcomes. I’ll also be doing a ton of my own writing. I don’t use Image/Video generative AI tools, and will continue to source any artwork and other creative elements as ethically as I can, including paying very talented creative people to produce them.
I live on this planet too, and I pay very close attention to the harm. I grew up in a country in a time where gasoline was available “leaded” and my town’s water had hexavalent chromium (the poison in the “Erin Brockovich” movie. I understand that industry can harm people pretty greatly, so I’ll continue to push where I can for minimizing harm while we advance in our technologies.
That said, I think there are many ways where the efforts of my computer use for weeks now can be brought down to minutes, and that benefit produces complex downstream benefits as hard to measure as the harms. If my “work” is done in a day that took me a month, that means not only using my machine (and office, and HVAC, and internet, and 40 commutes) less, but also the 4-12 various teams meetings and all their downstream costs. So, this project is about trying to get the most benefit to cost ratio from the tools, while being aware of the cost.
No responses yet