I am ethically and morally opposed to gen AI as a concept. As far as the breaking point, let me explain. I’ve been a machinist for ~18 years. It’s been really bad for the last 9 years and I’ve more or less had to live off of savings from the good years (those savings are basically gone).
I’ve just recently gotten legitimate job offers for ~$125 an hour remote because I own a CNC. The catch is that I have to record all of the CAM programming and machine time in order to train an AI to replace potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs.
This fucking sucks. I’d love to sit on my ass forever at 43, but I absolutely fucking hate the potential that I could bring that would crush the working class and elevate the owning class.
I wish it wasn’t this hard, because I really do believe in socialism and have labored hard for a long time to make it happen - but there’s a chance I can put everything I have into true anarchism cause and make a legitimate difference.
Please help.
It’s going to happen anyways. You’re not complicit in what’s happening if you take advantage of this opportunity that’s presented itself to you.
This is a new industrial revolution, and it’s going to displace jobs like yours. It sucks, but it’s happening.
There’s a shit load of theft and awful stuff happening right now and that’s abhorrent, but paying you for data is 100% legit and how every author and artist etc should have been compensated for the training data that’s gone into the machine learning black hole.
At the end of the day it’s up to you, but I wouldn’t worry about this one. They’re paying you for legitimate use. Eventually folks like yourself will be much rarer/specialized.
Don’t say he won’t be complicit because he totally would be. He’d knowingly accept the job and lay the work. Saying it’s gonna happen anyway might be a cope for this decision, but it’s a decision he alone takes with conscience, wether it bothers him or not.
eye roll Get it that this isn’t the right place for a nuanced discussion on this, or probably even the right platform, but I’ll say it anyways.
Congress is complicit in the grand theft of IP by not stopping it in its tracks. So is every employee that did the theft itself, every lawyer that helped arrange the financial details, etc. All the big data collection companies that sold your info are complicit in the rape of your privacy.
But the fact is that there are real technological innovations with the advent of modern machine learning, and it’s dumb to lump the march of innovation in with all the worst parts of whatever “AI” is.
OP isn’t complicit in the obsolescence of the actual work he does - that’s falsely assigning judgement and negative connotation to a plain fact: the industry he works in is changing. Eventually there will be many fewer machinists that do the work he does, and AI will do a lot of the work that used to be done by human machinists. That in and of itself isn’t a good or bad thing (it just IS), even if there’s TONS of negative externalities (environmental, economic control, loss of jobs, whatever). So no, OP isn’t complicit in some downfall of his industry if he sells his knowledge to train AI models.
Now, if he stole this data from employees in a company or something and sold it, he would be complicit in the theft of that information. But not necessarily the industry change that is coming.