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I agree that this analogy is (mildly) insulting to veganism.

This is another example of an ethical choice that I made!

Is the harm here that is caused by being offensive to veganism outweighed by the value of sparking useful conversations about personal approaches to AI ethics?

I think that it is.

It's similar to the ethics of attaching a click-bait headline to a valuable piece of journalism. Is it OK to do that? That depends, both on the specific case and on the opinions of individuals who observe that decision.

Seems like a disproportionate number of these comments are about using the vegan analogy. So setting aside offense or ethics, do you think it was a good idea to go with this analogy, or is it detracting from "the value of sparking useful conversations about personal approaches to AI ethics"? (emphasis mine)

I've been trying unsuccessfully to have good conversations about AI ethics for quite a while. This thread has 59 comments, and more than half of them aren't about veganism - so yeah, I think it worked.

And to be honest, if it hadn't worked I would have thought "well, it was worth a shot". The analogy genuinely works well for me.

> I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker.

I agree. This would more accurately be called "AI Luddism", opposing a new technology because of fears related to its immense productivity over humans. It has nothing to do with veganism

EDIT: that said, vegan is used in the sense of the article as "a really obvious and strong stance that people do not follow even though all the information about how it is bad is readily available"

I think calling it "AI Luddism" would offend people who are opposed to generative AI a lot more than calling it "AI veganism" offends vegans.

Why? The argument is very similar to the one that Luddites used: that the increased efficiency is harmful to artists

Try even hinting at calling them Luddites and see how they react!

So basically, they want to be called vegans, because that's a historically virtuous label, but not Luddites, because that's a historically maligned one? Even though they are literally not vegans, and literally are much closer to Luddites?

The argument is slightly different. This isn't about taking away a person's job. This is about eroding something that we as humans had previously thought was uniquely ours, intellectual creativity. The point of art was to express something by humans for other humans. The point was not to make a pretty picture, or a pleasant sounding song. When an AI does this it is and likely always will be a mere imitation of what art is supposed to be. The sad thing is that this imitation will be good enough and cheap enough that it will flood our daily lives. AI image and song generation will do what mobile did to computer games. Endless piles of low effort useless output and concepts distilled to the smallest possible set of features necessary for us to be suckered into purchasing them.

Is the argument of Luddism not also the erosion of transforming material things with your hands, something we also thought was uniquely human?

As more labor was automated, these exact arguments were made. It was thought that no machine could capture the beauty and skill of human craftsmen as creation was a fundamentally human task. It was thought to be "sad" that low-effort, mass-produced, standardized goods would be "good enough" to satisfy human needs, that there was some inextricable timeless beauty to human output that elevates over machine output. Time has shown us that machine output has become even more precise and skillful than human labor. These arguments feel almost 1:1.

At times this whole thing feels hypocritical. Generations of laborers grew up with the reality that their work was essentially a commodity. Now that it's our turn, we raise the age old arguments again.

Those "generations of laborers" had the option to earn more for less (and less dangerous) work most of the time. It doesn't seem this will be the case now.

Not at all. The changes were sudden and extreme. Look at the original Luddite rebellion for its oldest incarnation, but just look at the mechanizing of factories in the 60s with the introduction of CNCs or protests against automation at ports.

Automation of labor has been an ongoing force for decades and a reality laborers have had to live with for years.

This is of course not true (for ports in particular the writing had been on the wall for more than a decade) but even if it were, there eventually were other jobs. There won't be this time around.

That's not really what Luddites were about though. They were poor people in a reactionary and anti-democratic country, that was fighting (and winning) wars to stop democracy spreading while people at home starved:

https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/17/napoleon-d...

> In one conversation on St Helena, Napoleon was asked by his doctor what he would have done if he had managed to invade southern England in 1805. Napoleon’s reply was an absolute cracker: “I would have hastened over my flotilla with two hundred thousand men, landed as near Chatham as possible and proceeded direct to London, where I calculated to arrive in four days from the time of my landing. I would have proclaimed a republic and the abolition of the nobility and the House of Peers, the distribution of the property of such of the latter as opposed me amongst my partisans, liberty, equality and the sovereignty of the people.”

They smashed machines because that hurt the people oppressing them, not because they hated the machines.

Britain at the time wasn't as democratic as it is today certainly, but it was far more democratic than Napoleon's Empire that it was fighting against. Napoleon liked to pretend that he defended the French Revolution's ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, but in fact he went around creating new kingdoms and making his relatives monarchs.

I wasn't really trying to make the case that Napolean was a great guy, but he rose to power by winning battles in a war between the French Republic and a bunch of Monarchies, so there was a fairly clear democratic side.

Admittedly, the UK was warring againt the French Monach as well before, so it's not a clear cut thing, but things like Luddites and the 'Peterloo' show that Britain was not speeding towards greater democracy. They very slowly gave ground over centuries of struggle.

> The Tory Prime Minister in 1830, Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington, was resolutely opposed to parliamentary reform. However, there was growing support for limited change within his party, primarily because partially extending the franchise would allow the wealth and influence of Britain's growing middle class to be exploited.

That's 20 years later, a small extra step of democracy.

I was just trying to point out that smashing some stuff was a fairly reasonable thing to do when you don't have a vote and you're hungry, by providing some political context on the era.

> I feel it is insulting to veganism to try and coin this term. The moral arguments are not similar, and this one is frankly much weaker.

There are many, many, many people out there who believe it's fine to eat meat but not fine to e.g. feign attribution on intellectual work. Asserting that objections to this kind of tech are much weaker than various vegan arguments without explanation is odd.

> A human can mimic something with a single reference. It might not be good, but that can hardly matter for a discussion of ethics. The morality cannot depend on whether or not humans can do something poorly or not.

Asserting this without argument suggests you have a particular unstated idea of how ethical determinations are supposed to be made that you are projecting out onto the discussion. This would be important to lay out.

Murdering (or being complicit in the factory farming model), and then consuming another living conscious being is on a very different moral plane than remixing intellectual work.

It's hard to imagine the mental gymnastics required to think the two are in the same league.

Deciding that "living conscious being" is the category that merits moral status is one framework of justification for veganism – the Western originated-in-the-1970s-one. https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/rights/moralstatus_1.sh... I'm not saying that it's wrong, but to act like it should be taken as the default prior without requiring laying out its context is a very narrow view.

>It's hard to imagine the mental gymnastics required to think the two are in the same league.

It's really not hard. You just have to care more for the harm to the well-being of human artists than for the harm for the well-being of farmed animals. It may surprise some people but speciesism is the default position for the vast majority of the population.

Wait. When you say well being you're aware that killing them is close to the ultimate harm we can inflict on them.

What you're saying is that you think intellectual property is more valuable, to you, than the life of other conscious non human beings.

I think for most people, this is a stretch.

It really isn't. Most people don't consider farming murder and do not care about the well-being of non-cute, non-immediately present animals at all.

Redefining words like “murder” to include killing animals for food requires some pretty impressive mental gymnastics too.

But I don’t find either one hard to imagine.

Eating animals is kind of what our species has been doing for millenia.

The mental gymnastics are required to rationalize the act of eating meat and murder being the same thing.

> There are many, many, many people out there who believe it's fine to eat meat but not fine to e.g. feign attribution on intellectual work. Asserting that objections to this kind of tech are much weaker than various vegan arguments without explanation is odd.

The vegan argument is that factory farms are literal lifetime torture pins. This isn't much up to debate. You can shrug and choose to eat meat anyway, but co-opting their name for your argument on ip seems incredibly shallow. Even if you believe that ip violations are worse than animal cruelty. I'm not a vegetarian at all fwiw. Not too dissimilar from trying to frame this as the holocaust of artists or any other strongly held event / movement by many others.

> Asserting this without argument suggests you have a particular unstated idea of how ethical determinations are supposed to be made that you are projecting out onto the discussion. This would be important to lay out.

If your ethical framework suggests ip violations are immoral, unless you think the execution was bad that's just silly.