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1. A mass-distributed LLM (hosted by google or openai or whoever) that's been neutered and twisted into political correctness in a haphazard series of kneejerk meetings of small groups of people who are terrified big investors will walk away or that some powerful political group will denounce them. Effectively they create an enormous bias of falsity and incorrectness, for billons of people to use and embed the results throughout all their intellectual output.
2. Some wacko with an expensive Nvidia GPU makes deepfake porn of a popular politician. Or goodness forbid, of some weird kink where if this was actually a scene filmed with real people, there would be serious ethical issues.
Which scenario do you think is more dangerous, long term, and in terms of broad impact on society in general?
Case in point: large advertisers and entertainment companies "pander" to these sorts of views, because it is broadly popular
This is not the work of a shadowy cabal
Most people in the country dont give a shit about historical injustices and are worried about how they are going to pay their rent or put food on the table today.
I gave some evidence that being socially progressive / "woke" is broadly popular. Advertisers are not activists, they're following what people like
> Broadly popular
Are they? Or are the loudest voices asymmetrically affecting discourse?
> This is not the work of a shadowy cabal
And how would you know if it was? What would the clues be? If you were in a bubble that was designed to impart an informal religious view (and it is a religion sometimes, just one with a screen instead of a book) that encompass politics and morality, how would you know?
If someone invents a lockpick capable of opening any door, they have a moral responsibility in preventing it from falling into wrong hands, whether they want it or not. And it's absurd to complain when someone who could create an universal lockpick, refuses to do so, never mind release the technology to the wild, and only agrees to sell simpler picks capable of picking simpler locks. Do these people also complain about things like work against nuclear proliferation? After all, North Korea got nukes anyway, so what's the point?
Software doesn't work that way. I agree that you should be responsible about dangerous tech, but you also have to be realistic about what the best way to do that is, which is pretty much never "keep it hidden."
(and, of course, this is not even considering the question that should probably go here which is -- how dangerous is this exactly? Given the moral panic we saw a while ago about e.g. Photoshop, I'm not entirely convinced that this is much to worry about.)
They don't have a moral responsibility to do jack squat other than sell an honest product and honor their warranties. You don't like that, tough.
Unfortunately, this is a very silly argument. I'm so glad that people like you weren't around when they invented the personal computer.
One could argue that if $BIGCORP doesn't want their thing to be used by bad actors, they should just refrain from developing the technology at all, and while it's a somewhat defensible position, that would also result in techbros not getting their toy, so it doesn't really apply here.
If there's one lesson from the 21st century, it's that's you shouldn't release massively impacting technology without strong ethics controls around it.