Against Vibes Part 2: Ought You Use a Generative Model
Since the wide-spread availability and forced deployment of generative models, people have argued about the ethics using them. Many arguments have been presented to argue that they’re bad: they use too much electricity, boil the oceans, massively infringe on copyright, put people out of work, and generate slop. And therefore, you are ethically obliged to not use them.
I sympathize with the fundamental conclusion: that there is something ethically bad about the current situation. But I can’t really take these arguments seriously, for two reasons: (1) if you look into any one of the arguments, the details are (shocking) a little more complicated (2) it’s hard to judge the validity of an ethical argument when no one is willing to make explicit their system of ethics.
In this post, I’m not going to argue about whether generative models are useful. I came up with a model of usefulness in the previous post, which doesn’t say generative models are useful, but gives you a framework for deciding whether one is for a given task and user. For the moment, though, I’ll assume for the sake of argument that there is a use for generative models, so now we need to answer a different question.
Ought you use a generative model? I don’t mean is it good for a specific task; that’s an is question, about whether it is useful. I mean ought you use a model: is there an ethical argument for or against you using generative models, categorically. I’m not going to spoil the ending, because the argument is more important than my conclusion.