The only reason any of us defend it is that's how we make money. Honestly a lot of people in tech should be a little ashamed.
> The tech industry has long, long, long been a rapacious pump and dump scheme where the tech is barely relevant and most of the industry has been harvesting violations of social norms and regulations (tracking and ad tech, Uber, etc.).
The tech industry != the tech community. OpenAI is part of the tech industry, and I think you are accurately describing their behavior.
But the question was about the failures of the tech community, and I think those are different and exploited by the tech industry.
Basically I think a large fraction of the tech community is composed of gullible and easily propagandized software engineers who believe in sci-fi fantasy and consistently overestimate their own abilities and understanding. That kind of person is incapable of "clarify[ing] what [OpenAI's] products really are," because they're some of the people with the most personal (ideological?) investment in the hype.
I've worked in tech in banking, gambling, software development, internet service provision, and even the postal service. They were all extremely scummy compared to the sector I work in now.
"What did I do today? Helped a bunch of doctors get the information they needed to diagnose someone's obscure disease. What did you do?"
"Oh, I worked on ways to make my company's app more addictive to 12-year-olds, and look less like gambling."
I'm happy to be in the first group.
I think it's true that a lot of people are a little ashamed already, but that a lot of people in tech should be more actively opposed to what's happening. As a small example, part of the paycheck I get from placing hidden F_cebook tracking on my corporate website to analyze the behaviors of people who could not possibly consent, I donate to the EFF. Actually it's quite difficult to be politically engaged against abusive tech in the same way I may or may not be engaged in local politics, but money is one thing we all have.
Aren't we though? In my experience people that are super proud to be working close to things like adtech or social media are generally early-career, and haven't worked out for themselves yet how these things are a huge net-negative. At least you could make the argument that AI is more ambiguous.
And whether you're a data-scientist, application developer, or infrastructure engineer, the situation is the same. I think we'd all rather be curing cancer, working on climate change, maybe even doing meaningful work in the government sector. Those jobs mostly don't exist, and where they do: they don't pay market rates, and they aren't like other tech jobs where meaningful experience is much more important than things like academic credentials.
Regarding market rates, one could argue that tech workers are in a privileged position and should have the luxury of concluding that money isn't everything. But even without dependents, even with a tech salary, for lots of people housing is still pretty unaffordable, healthcare is nuts, retirement pushed back or seeming impossible. This kind of insecurity understandably leads to scarcity mentality where honesty/integrity and other ideals of how to be a morally upright citizen are on hold, and slimy behaviour or at least associating with slime is just normal.
Most money of any kind isn't clean if you really look into it, and it seems like there's fewer ways to earn an honest living in tech compared to say blue-collar work. Coding was still mostly fun and games maybe as recently as 10 years ago, but weaponized disinformation is bringing it closer to something like chemistry, where even if you're not working on nerve-gas you're probably still trafficking with adjacent big-pharma, oil companies, etc. But there's a lot more tech-workers than chem PhDs.
Shame seems like it's still required, but actually feeling guilty requires responsibility, and responsibility requires viable alternative options.