Articles tagged with ethics
I maintain several open source projects. A few are healthy, a few are barely hanging on, and one nearly drained my desire to work in this field at all. "Free software" keeps getting read as "costs nothing," and I'm one of the people who pays for that misreading.
Yesterday the moderators of r/opensource, a community of about 392,000 people, banned any project that "uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI." By the afternoon there was a revolt, a rival subreddit, and a pile of people pointing out that the Linux kernel takes AI-assisted code now. I don't think the rule will survive the week. The instinct behind it is another matter, because plenty of us have felt it.
Using AI is fine. Using it to replace your thinking isn't.
There's a version of AI adoption that looks like efficiency and is actually absence. You've stopped being the person doing the work. You've become the person approving outputs. The strange part is how good it feels while it's happening. The work gets faster, the results look competent, and nobody notices, including you, until the day you need the skill the tool was quietly doing on your behalf.
In the ever-evolving world of technology, few names shine as beacons of both innovation and social advocacy quite like Timnit Gebru. A prominent figure in the fields of artificial intelligence and ethics in technology, Gebru is not only a trailblazer in programming but also a staunch advocate for equality and civil rights.