On applying ethics to the LLMs and coding assistants situation

It often frustrates technologists that there isn’t an algorithm for deciding ethical behavior. You can’t follow a checklist or a set of rules to decide whether something’s ethical or not (or you can, but people might still disagree with you). That said there are professional codes of practice that apply to our work, and in the field of computing one of the clearest is the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct jointly developed by the ACM, IFIP, and IEEE. Here’s how I interpret its position on LLMs with respect to a few points: I’m interested to hear how you evaluate the ethical nature of LLM adoption with respect to the other parts of the Code. A computing professional should… 1.1 Contribute to society and to human well-being, acknowledging that all people are stakeholders in computing. It’s not clear that the current crop of leading frontier companies are uniformly doing this. For example, Dario Amodei’s statements about AI leading to a white-collar bloodbath and being a…

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