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Comment by gkbrk | Hacker News Reader

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gkbrk

The list of people who signed this is amusing. I am supposed to listen to these experts about using AI ethically?

Small selection of people who condemn this "unethical use of AI".

- Amazon Alexa (internet connected microphone in your house to sell you things)

- Google (collect your data and sell targeted ads to the highest bidder)

- Facebook (run experiments to make people more engaged/outraged on the website)

- HrFlow (automate biased hiring with the power of AI)

- Microsoft (collect data from users, launder a ton of GPL and MIT code without adhering to their license with the power of AI)

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Condemning this is an easy virtue signal to boost their reputation.

If some new startup wanted to use AI to identify women getting abortions and offered good money, I reckon that a lot of the signatories here would be sell-outs and offer their expertise.

I don't recall a letter like this in the wake of aggregateiq using ML to interfere in elections or clearview conducting intrusive facial recognition

To be fair, those people might also disagree (at least to a certain extent) with the bullshit that their employers are doing.

Perhaps they disagree, but they don't disagree enough to inconvenience themselves or stop publicly associating with their credentials. In fact they proudly sign public documents with their company name.

Maybe a normal person might prefer their salary or position over disagreements like this, that's a fair position. But these people put themselves on a higher moral ground by "condemning unethical use of AI". Clearly they need to be more ethical if they judge others based on this.

That’s just insipid what’s purism on your part. None of these are as bad as something whose only purpose is to spew out hate.

Facebook literally did the same experiment but with 600k people.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...

They are worse. They have vastly greater on-the-ground negative impacts on real live people.

Hurting people does not become OK because you do it decorously.

Facebook purposefully manipulated the emotional states of thousands of users.

This guy made a bot to shitpost on /pol/ without getting noticed. As far as I see, the worst thing he did was subject the people browsing /pol/ to more of the same bullshit they spew there daily. Good play on his part though, making the direct victims of his AI fuckery the most unsympathetic people you can find online.

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