Content tagged with "Ethics"

I enjoyed this recent blog post by acclaimed technologist Terence Eden proposing a thought experiment about the ethics of open sourcing a hypothetical LLM classifier trained on benefits sanction appeal letters.

Eden, himself a huge open source advocate, argues, quite compellingly that such a model should be kept closed to prevent the potential leakage of potentially confidential information in the training data or probing of the model for the purpose of abusing it.

However, as some of the post's commentators point out, there is a bigger question at play here: where is it appropriate to be using this kind of tech?

One of the key issues in my mind is the end-user's treatment and the power dynamic at play here. If you're making life-and-death decisions (tw suicide) about people who have few resources to challenge those decisions, then you should have appropriate systems in place to make sure that decisions are fair, explainable and rational. You must provide mechanisms that allow the party with everything to lose in this situation to understand what is happening and why. Finally, There must always be an adequate escape hatch mechanism for recourse if the computer gets it wrong.