For your average technological layman most digital technologies seem to pretty much be magic. Somehow a bunch of ones and zeros can be transformed into a movie @@ -140,10 +141,50 @@ symbols and is thus able to reason a response instead of merely guessing what tokens go next.
-+One aspect of LLMs which is often demanded but seldom actually considered are +the ethical considerations, and there is a sense in which you cannot blame +people for evading the question, as our ethical framework has become quite +impoverished over the last few centuries. In the secularist world we could +probably say that the predominant ethical framework is either utilitarian (of +some sort) or emotivist. As such much of the discussion around the ethics of LLM +usage revolve around the consequences and the effects, rather than the classical +approach traditionally taken by the West which focuses on what a thing is and +what it is for. Even among some Catholic celebrities, due to this prevailing +ethical framework, the thought process tends to get stifled at the consequences +of LLMs, wherefore the only limitations or considerations placed on the use of +LLMs becomes a simple “don't do bad stuff with it.” But this is not serious. If +we're going to treat this new revolutionary technology seriously we must +consider what it is and what it is for. +
+ ++For this I must refer to a video made by New Polity titled “Should Christians +Use ChatGPT?”[2] which is the only resource I have +found as of yet which actually addresses the issue of the nature of LLMs – +thought to be fair, I haven't done a lot of research on my own and I was already +subscribed to them. I don't wish to go through the entire syllogism here, +because that's what they made the video for, as well as their blog article “AI +Chatbots Are Evil”[3] (which probably spoils some of +the answer from the title), but I do wish to briefly summarize the concluding +statements taking for granted that we all accept basic virtue ethics. In short, +we first start not with the LLMs and the chatbots, but with human conversation +and its purpose, and note that, as mentioned in the article: +
+ ++“Conversation is for communion. The ability to speak and to listen, to +discuss, to reveal our hidden, intellectual life by articulating ourselves in a +public, common language with the hope of receiving a response–all this has +as its natural correlate in another intelligence, one who receives our meaning, +understands it (or misunderstands it), and has the power to respond in kind, +revealing the hidden reality of his or her own subjectivity.” ++ +