Another useless AI rant, me screaming into the void, feel free to ignore.
When we see someone brandishing a knife, we tend to go "They have a weapon." Then they use it to cut a rope or open a letter. Or just cut some bread. Then we go "It's a tool."
When we see someone holding a firearm, we immediately go "They have a weapon!" But then it turns out that it was a flaregun, which they fired in a forest to help the helicopter pilot to find the person in trouble. Then we go "It's a tool."
Now pedantics would say "Weapon is a tool, it's just meant for causing harm." But I digress.
We have a lot of these type of items. Hammers for example we perceive as tool first, weapon second.
Now to make my point: When I look at "AI" stuff, I very commonly see a weapon.
- It's used to hurt women and minorities
- It's made on top of unfair labor
- It can cause people to commit violent acts
- It can cause psychosis
- It causes people to get laid off from work
- It can be harmful for our planet as companies do not care
- People behind them burn books, destroying knowledge
- It can hurt knowledge workers
- It can hurt studying
And I'm sure there are many more examples. Yes, one can argue that it's the people behind the tool, not the tool itself. But that's just the thing, isn't it?
The fact that people and companies use it as a tool to cause harm makes it a weapon in my eyes. Maybe it was meant to be a tool, but people and companies certainly hold it like a weapon. You can argue its not meant to be held that way, but the arguments are irrelevant, as we are living in reality where it is being held as a weapon.
Even for something that it should be good for, such as a tool for cancer research, it can be mediocre at best: A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis
So this is why I'm so wary of it all and allowing it near me. If I see a random stranger waving a knife near me, I will stay the hell away from that stranger. Even if they tell me "it's just a tool."
Thus when I see a random stranger open a merge request to a project I help maintain, and it's full of LLM generated stuff, I don't see a great tool: I see a random person waving a knife around. Someone will very likely get hurt.
On other hand, if I know the person and trust them, I do not have to stay away. For example, I trust my dad to hold a knife properly and I know he will use it as a tool, likely for crafting something. However, if my dad knows that the knife was made by people who test it by hurting others, he would never buy anything from them. If the knife had subscription fees, he would never pay them again.
If you use these weapons as tools, be careful you do not hurt anyone. Though the creation of them hurts our planet already, but it seems many people do not care. Such as the people working on these things in my home country: Google told to halt work on datacentres in Finland over environmental concerns
Anyway, I don't mean to tell anyone what to do. Just that I am uncomfortable with these things and they're burning me out real bad.
Stay safe out there.