this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2026
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Yes.
Lemmy is just by default super AI-hating. I wonder what they felt when Linus Torvalds said that LLM are actually useful tools.
We felt like he's right about it being useful tools but the ethical aspects are hard to ignore. Yes, many ethical aspects.
You're likely conflating the tools with the implementation or the implementers. An open source model on local hardware has next to zero ethical concerns.
There are MANY ethical concerns about the actions of the big players in AI, their data centers, and to some extent, the original, bootstrapped training data sourcing.
Well, yes and no. Even open source models had to consume a lot of power for the training, including the use of non-owned data
Many, many, many things "consume a lot of power" which is both common and benign. A whirlpool tub "consumes a lot of power" for example. So does an electric stove. And the power can be from any source, such as solar, hydro, or wind.
That's why I specified there's minor issues that could be argued about the original data sources. However, that bird has flown the coop. There's no putting that genie back in the bottle, and no way to undo it. You could argue the company's responsible owe every single person on the planet some form of restitution, which I do, but I don't think that qualifies as an ethical concern since it's universal. No one person was harmed more than another, it was all publicly available data - so the public should benefit from the result. Refusing to use it only hampers yourself, at no detriment to those perceived as wrongdoers.
I rarely see people agonize over the ethics of playing a game on high settings for hours because of the frivolous use of electricity.
Right? Yet using AI takes less electricity than that. The concerns are being wildly exaggerated, overblown, and I suspect it's being done intentionally as a psychological attack on societies to hinder competing nations from faster adoption.