"Some internal conflict" is putting it lightly 😅

I'm super fascinated by the current wave of "AI" stuff.  It reminds me of the level of fascination I had back in the 90s when the internet was first becoming publicly available, and it felt like such a broad new horizon.

That said, there's a lot of very heated, very emotional (and not always very logical or practical) debate out there about AI, and to say that I have "some internal conflict" on the matter would be putting it very lightly.  There are myriad ethical areas of concern when it comes to embracing generative AI into my workflow, and I'm going to do my best to take note of these concerns and encourage discussion of ethics in AI usage, as well as challenge myself to continue surfacing any concerns I have with my team, and not just for posturing on the interwebs.

I've always joked that when the war between robots and humans comes, I'm super likely to side with the robots. 

To put it simply, I'm super torn.  I am honestly a huge fan of some of the generative AI tools that are available, and I use them in dozens of places in my professional workflow, my hobbies, and even for organization and odd jobs around the house here and there. 

There are some obvious real issues, and these tools can make some overtly bad things easy to do, there is no escaping that truth.

However, in most of the discussions that I see online (over and over and over ad nauseum), the blame is often placed on the tool itself (or on the company not effectively moderating its use) and never on the bad actor doing the bad thing.

One of the biggest things people are upset about is copyright infringement, as it feels like nothing on the internet is safe, and ownership of content is... tenuous at best.

I've always held what I know to be a fairly controversial view about privacy on the internet. It bears mentioning that this stance was developed more as a guideline to myself personally than as a rule for other people, but it's relevant to the subject:   there IS no such thing as privacy. My rule of thumb for things like posting on social media (which I admit i still violate sometimes) is as follows:

If you don't want people to see it and possibly share it with your mother, your boss, or your love interest, don't put it on the internet.  period.

To bring my ramble back to the topic of copyright stuff:

• Can I use generative AI to slop out some facsimile of someone else's work?  Yes. (though generally not even remotely as easily as the haters say it is)
• Should I do that?  No, of course not.
• Is it the fault of the tool when someone DOES use it to copy someone else?  Also no.

This is just one of the dozens of ethical issues I see day to day working with AI stuff, and honestly, this one simply doesn't bother me much, but I'm also not someone who depends on creative output directly to survive who is being threatened by this, so I'm sure my stance seems either ignorant or callous to some. 

The bigger topics that bother me are things like:   "If I get good enough at using AI, is it going to take the place of any of my teammates (or other people that I would have paid/hired otherwise?)"

we'll certainly get into some of those topics as well.   ok time to get back to it.