Many people on Lemmy despise AI with a passion, and demand storefronts provide them with the ability to exercise their prejudice against developers choosing to use AI tools during development. I think it’s silly, but if we’re going to start judging developers based on the tools they used then we should expand the concept to the full extent. For example, many people here don’t like Microsoft, and so developers should be forced to disclose whether they used Windows, Visual Studio or GitHub in development so that people can discriminate on that basis.
Personally I think Apple is the worst company in the technology industry, and I would like to be able to see which developers used Apple hardware in development so I can boycott them and make sure none of my funds are inadvertantly going to pay Apple. We’re abandoning the old practice of simply judging software based on the end product, and instead we’re scrutinizing the creation process itself, so we shouldn’t stop at just AI usage. Let’s pick apart every development decision that would otherwise be invisible to the end user.
Why stop at AI? Using a Mac is far more unethical in my view. Let’s enable people to boycott on every single possible tool used, and not focus on a single one.
I had to upvote because both the title and text do qualify as unpopular by several standards. I suspect that it’s rage bait rather than an actual opinion though.
Just in case it isn’t bait, and is just unnecessarily aggressively worded, I agree with the underlying concept. I don’t think it would apply to OS levels just because it’s not relevant to the end user. No closed source os is going to be fully ethical. No corporate os can be either, imo, though I’m not as confident that a non profit is or isn’t at the same risk of bad behavior.
But yeah, we should all have some degree of information about fundamental decisions in the process of what we use. How much detail, what details, and who is obligated legally is the real difficulty. You make it too much of a pain in the ass, and bye-bye big segments of the FOSS dev community.
However, I think trying to pin it on the fact of AI existing and being treated as a bad thing is spurious thinking. That’s because there are already people that will object to and refuse to use software that’s significantly dependent on apple or Microsoft. Not a ton of people, but they’ve existed for decades. Others will refuse to use anything closed source. People do what you’re suggesting as well. Very, very rarely but some developers are quite open about some details of their hardware, and plenty will gladly talk about their os of choice and why they chose it.
So trying to shoehorn it into a false equivalency with ai doesn’t hold water even with that false equivalency in play. Supervising a generative llm or letting the llm do everything, vs running an os on hardware just aren’t the same thing at all.
Let’s be blunt nothing made by humans can be truely and purely “ethical” if for no other reason then ethics vary.
Plenty of things are on that sliding scale of mid ground where any reasonable person could go either way.
Ethics are what the person defining them believes they are. No more or less. There’s after all no such thing as universal ethics.
We get close with some things but they are almost universally the extreme ends.
Like unless we want to pull out the Nazi arguments saying something is always unethical is just hard to do.
Yeah, I’m on board with the all ethics being situational wagon. I’m just saying that weighing a given issue ethically is necessary in a complex society.
Thank you, you get it. Besides, when people making decisions are involved, it is indeed prejudice and discrimination. Refusing to eat at a restaurant that uses AI imagery is no different from refusing to eat there because the cook has a tattoo. Some people are just put off by the visual, even if it has no impact on the food.
I didn’t intend it as rage bait. It is my sincere opinion. I only post here because it seems ALL of my opinions are unpopular. Bully for me, no?
Given the mood here on Lemmy, I really don’t think my intentionally passive aggressive prose is unnecessary. This is literally a new culture war, and there are literally people on this platform saying they’ll make it their life’s mission to harass people who use AI.
Personally, I’m a realist, so I would rather see constructive solutions that aren’t adversarial. Such as instituting AI-usage tax that is paid out universally, so that everyone who contributes to what amounts to a social project to benefit from their unintended efforts.
I really do hate Apple with the same passion others hate AI, though, and I’d love to be able to exercise my own prejudices in the same way that people are currently exercising their prejudice against LLM technology. 😒
I mean, no, the passive aggressive thing isn’t necessary. Hell, I’m aggressive fairly often, I just don’t make the habit of assuming it’s okay and trying to justify it. Sometimes, I’m an asshole. If you’re also going to be an asshole with that kind of base assumption (which comes across pretty damn “look at me” edgelord), you gotta at least not pretend it’s acceptable.
That being said, I think you miss a lot of the fediverse nuance on the issue. There’s entire instances that a ai/llm friendly. There’s plenty of folks like me that will openly discuss their stance that the problems are about implementation, not the underlying idea or technology (what I think of as the FOSS AI crowd).
I’m also with you on apple, though I don’t waste hate on them over any other massive corporation fucking with the world.
I’m also with you on the heavy taxation idea, and would add heavy regulation to it. If we’re going to be fucked over by capitalist ai, at least give us a reacharound and ban non consensual anal.
Point taken. I’ll try to rein in my sour disposition about my passion, and chosen career, being everyone else’s target dummy 😂 Thank you for sharing your insight.