Did something bad? Better ablate yourself of the responsibility of holding people to account for making it _worse_! Acting this way just makes it seem more like you regret the blood on your hands because it has dirtied your shirt, and not because you’ve done something actually bad, otherwise you’d have at least some degree of guilt and reticence to see things get worse.
Looking at the 30,000-foot view of how society is set up: laws, economic system, employee incentives, etc, do you suppose it matters what the individual contributors think? I say this not to absolve anyone of responsibility, but to point out the obvious outcomes of our incentives across the strata (polity -> shareholders -> boards -> C-suite -> employees)
I will bet you dollars to donuts, somewhere inside OpenAI is a frequently-used revenue dashboard, but not for loneliness - if anything, OpenAI will make horny models and tout itself as a solution to loneliness, a la character.ai - if that earns them more money.
I think assuming people will use it as a tutor/learning tool is.. way too optimistic. A small fraction will, but the majority will just view things like a second language as something not worth learning.
I think there's a logic leap here that ignores most of what big companies know about how to gey people addicted to things
If you're talking about ChatGPT in general (as I guess you are) I think the Jury's still out on whether this will have a net positive or negative on society.
Right now, it's leaning towards negative, but there are optimistic futures to be had at the same time.
As someone who likes to think that they would turn down a lot of tech jobs due to moral dilemmas - for me, currently working on AI wouldn't be one.
For me at-least it's a tool to learn quicker, and reduce friction on projects I otherwise may not have dived into. As with all new technology, we're still in this grace period / lack the bigger picture we now have on other, now known to be destructive technologies.
The morality of an action isn’t based on actual consequences because the future isn’t known in advanced. All we can do is act on the perceived consequences of our actions, and if we think those are good, pursue them.
The loneliness epidemic is driven by companies maximizing keeping their customers engaged with their screens, something OpenAI is wont to do. Knowing that the company wants customers engaged and that this will do that, and also knowing that that plays into the loneliness epidemic by substituting human interaction, makes it far different than getting married and then maybe or maybe not getting divorced.