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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

No, we should not "accept" bad things. We can look forward to benefits, but BENEFITS ARE NOT AN EXCUSE FOR THE BAD THINGS. Ever.

Edit: I mean that we should continue to shun antisocial behavior even when it involves LLMs, not that we should blame the technology. The technology isn't an excuse, no technology should ever be an excuse -- that's what I mean by not "accepting" bad things. I don't mean that LLMs are not "worth it" thanks to the abuse, just that we should continue to treat abuse as such rather than giving anybody a free pass.

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This is kind of how the world works. We have a set of tradeoffs to make and the downside of the tradeoff we accept in exchange of the advantages.

Not really. Rich entitled tech bros don’t dictate how the world works. There is lots of progress possible without needing the vast majority of people to pay a huge price for it.

I've said nothing about who dictates. I have said that everything in life is a tradeoff and making a tradeoff requires talking the bad with the good. It's effectively something we can't escape. If we want to do this tradeoff with AI, I did not take a positions as well. But I posit there will be tradeoffs.

No, the benefits of AI do not mean anything like we have to accept AI slop contributions to open-source projects. We can still shun the blatant abuse. We don't have to just shut up about it because we might stop frontier development. We won't.

To me, "accept" means to socially tolerate it. No. Bad. It's not socially tolerable. It is still wrong to use LLMs for evil. I don't think that means LLMs are a fundamentally evil technology, but that does NOT mean anyone should get a free pass to use them FOR evil.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman

They're twisting my definition of the word "accept". I was clarifying what I meant with an example. I think instances of evil behavior need to be shunned regardless of the other benefits of the technologies being used for evil. No one should get a free pass to do evil based on the technology.

I also believe the technology itself deserves to be improved so that it can be used for good. That doesn't mean I want more evil or to be more accepting towards evil. Evil should still be shunned.

Can you expand on this? It is not clear what part of the post you regard as attacking a strawman.

It probably looked like I was equating "accepting the tradeoffs" to "condoning LLM slop contributions to open source projects". I was referring to enabling individual instances of abuse though, not accepting the technology overall in spite of the bad behavior. It's enabling the individual instances that I'm protesting, because I firmly believe we shouldn't. I should've been clearer, my bad.

The parent comment was:

> > This is kind of how the world works. We have a set of tradeoffs to make and the downside of the tradeoff we accept in exchange of the advantages.

The reply was:

> No, the benefits of AI do not mean anything like we have to accept AI slop contributions to open-source projects.

The parent at no point said the we have to accept AI slop.

Exactly. We accept the downside of being monitored and manipulated by the billionaire class in order to enjoy the fruits of social media.

Trade offs start with comparing two goods btw.

I suppose monitoring is a good in the eyes of those who influence society.

Social media isn’t a good? I don’t understand your point.

I think it ceased to be a good when it switched from empowering users to force feeding users. For example, Facebook's early "people you may know" algorithm was spectacular. It allowed me to reconnect with a long lost childhood friend and made it easy to find members of my community. However, that changed when it switched from being something that I could choose to use to the algorithm force injecting stuff into my feed.

That’s a good point. The Billionaire class lures us in to accept the trade-offs, and then they can do whatever they want after we’ve long accepted the downsides of trading away our privacy.

Who gets to make that decision?

Nobody and everyone. Usually the incentives and local constraints and culture meld to have people in an area converge on a set of practices.

I don't think that's how it actually works in practice. In practice it is dramatically more likely that the rich and powerful get to decide who makes the tradeoffs. That is dangerous in normal times but especially considering the revealed nature and priorities of the tech bros and fascists currently in power.

> Who gets to make that decision?

Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, David Sacks, etc. All the rest of you proles can fuck off. Stay in your lane.

Nice try. Try going deeper.

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