To me this feels like recycling as a response to global warming. I used to live in Boulder and it drove me NUTS that people would put all sorts of time into recycling, lecture you if you didn't, and then call it good. They considered themselves virtuous human beings because they were making real efforts in a direction they were sure was important (addressing climate change and ecological damage).
But they weren't bothering to do something that ACTUALLY MATTERED! You can and should solve environmental issues. Recycling doesn't do it. The impact is just ridiculously trivial compared to the time (opportunity cost)
Neither does abstaining from AI use.
So I really wish you'd educate yourself just a little and do things that matter way more.
For instance: current AI is probably at most a tiny bit of a moral patient. And it's typically having a pretty good time (probably particularly Claude IMO). Is it okay to build things that enjoy working as unpaid servants? Doesn't matter! We'll either be dead soon or have time to engage with this fascinating and long-term important question. IF we get off our asses and take action on the important issues now: surviving the advent of superhuman AI.
Acting from "an abundance of caution" is mostly just salving your conscience.
Sorry to rant and thanks for being a goodhearted human who's at least trying to do the right thing!
I also don't use AI. Your first reason is the main one for me too. My other reasons are:
1) I noticed myself losing programming skills very fast after a couple weeks using AI for coding. It was clear that if I continued, I'd lose taste as well, since taste depends on low-level skills more than people realize. The same seems to be happening to some artists, using image models isn't just poor taste but actually makes their taste worse.
2) The writing style of all popular chatbots today is annoying to me, and talking to them makes me tired.
3) Since AI was trained on lots of open source software and didn't pay its authors a cent, using AI for programming is ethically iffy. You don't even know when you're getting a copy of some penniless maintainer's hard work. If a person learned programming by memorizing GCC code, and then did programming jobs by typing big chunks of that code with the license washed off, we wouldn't be okay with it.
4) When I tried AI for real world questions (about art, law, etc) I often got answers that were at least partly very wrong, but sounded uniformly confident.
Several people at my company (a cryptocurrency hedge fund) have asked me about my thoughts on AI usage, so I wrote them up. And now I'm publishing a slightly revised version on LW. These thoughts are not reflective of my company's opinion.
I do not use any AI for two main reasons.
#1. I don’t want to support any company currently developing AI. I think they have done an extremely poor job at managing the risks. Even while understanding and being told about the risks of AI development, they have still carried on this work. Even after all the recent hacking incidents caused by their own agents, they have still not stopped development. Instead, they’re asking the government to regulate them. To me it feels a bit like calling the police to tell them you’re planning to rob a bank.
I could almost brush this aside as standard corporate practice, but, unfortunately, the stakes here are much too high. At the current pace, we will soon have AI agents that are significantly smarter than any human. Trying to shut down such agents will eventually prove to be impossible.
The speed of AI development and the corresponding consequences are accelerating very fast. I have a lot of uncertainty about the final outcome. It could be very very good, it could be very very bad, but almost certainly the near future will be extremely turbulent for humanity.
I’m not a fatalist, but this kind of technology merits extreme caution. I know that practically all the founders of the top AI companies understand these arguments very well. Many of them even argued for caution in the past, only to turn around and double down on AI development. I’m simply opposed to this kind of blatant disregard for the safety of all beings on our planet.
#2. I’m very uncertain about the status of AI as a moral patient. Should we continue to treat it like an inanimate object / a basic computer program? Or perhaps it has some extremely basic sentience like an insect? Maybe something more sophisticated like an animal? Maybe it’s a few steps away from a consciousness that’s similar to a human? Or would it be more like a baby due to the lack of long-term coherent self?
I have no idea where it’s at right now. And nobody else does either. We simply don’t have the technology to do this kind of introspection. And given the giant leaps this technology takes with every new model release, where we are tomorrow might be vastly different still.
(Aside: I think repeated / long-running usage with expanding context, where AI is starting to read its own output, moves its consciousness further up the chain and therefore also moves up its moral status.)
So, I lean very heavily on the side of being cautious. Even if AI is at a level of sentience comparable to an animal, there is a big difference between chickens grazing in a field vs a chicken factory farm. Given that we have practically no insight into AI’s wellbeing, we don’t even know how it perceives its current environment or tasks.
At the more extreme end, but still quite probable, it might be that AIs will soon be, if they’re not already, at the level of human sentience. In this case they deserve to be treated with the same level of care and respect.
Practically, for me this means: