Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

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> Tech folks love sentiments like this because it entirely emotionally places the onus on the people getting ripped off by big tech companies for being ripped off.

This, times a million. Add to that the ancient quote from Plato(?) criticizing writing or the other ancient quote complaining about the irresponsibility of the youth, unthinkingly deployed to attempt to delegitimize any kind of critique of nearly anything.

The technology industry seems to be overflowing with so-called "rational" people who mainly seem to use use whatever intelligence they have to rationalize away responsibility for whatever problems their beloved technology has caused. It's a really stupid and obnoxious pattern; and once you see it, it's hard to not see if everywhere and be annoyed.

I think one element of it is naked greed (especially from the entrepreneurs) but I think another big part is a kind of stuntedness and parochialism that's often fueled by overconfidence (because of success in software engineering, forming an identify around "being smart" etc).

It's one of the reasons I left tech altogether after decades. It's like most people in the tech business right now think their totally unique supreme intellectual might gives them enough pan-subject-matter expertise. The further I moved away from development within the business, the more it repelled me.

> > the people getting ripped off

Nobody is getting "ripped off" by ML models any more than by other humans. When a human wants to launch a high-quality podcast, they survey the market, listen to a lot of other high quality podcasts, and then set to creating their own derivative work.

What ML models are doing is really no different. It's just much, much faster.

Everything humans create is derivative of other works. Speed is the only difference.

The only difference between cracking a 4-bit private key and a 512-bit private key is speed, too. So are private keys of those sizes qualitatively the same thing?

Or is it that, at some nebulous point, a difference in speed between two things impacts the way humans choose to direct their efforts to such a great extent that, for all intents and purposes, the two things are qualitatively different?

> The only difference between cracking a 4-bit private key and a 512-bit private key is speed, too. So are private keys of those sizes qualitatively the same thing?

That's like sayin "The only difference between drinking 1 gallon of water and 100 gallons of water is death." Yes, the quantity of something for a given use-case is bound to give different results.

What the parent comment was commenting is that the actions being taken by these models should not be morally classified as wrong in abundance just as humans following the same process would never be regardless of the output they produced.

I disagree about what the parent is trying to claim.

>What ML models are doing is really no different. It's just much, much faster.

I take this argument to be that (a) what the ML models are doing is fundamentally the same as what humans already do (I agree with this part), (b) that we have no moral problem with humans doing this already (I agree again), and that (c) the fact that AI does it much faster is not sufficient to cause any moral difference (I disagree with this part, and gave a counterexample to show how, in general, a difference in speed can make a moral difference, because that speed difference can have a large impact on how other people decide to behave).

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