[_ttg]

I want to sympathize but enforcing a moral blockade on the "vast majority" of inbound inquiries is a self-inflicted wound, not a business failure. This guy is hardly a victim when the bottleneck is explicitly his own refusal to adapt.

[venturecruelty]

Survival is easy if you just sell out.

[aylmao]

It's unfair to place all the blame on the individual.

By that metric, everyone in the USA is responsible for the atrocities the USA war industry has inflicted all over the world. Everyone pays taxes funding Israel, previously the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc.

But no one believes this because sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and one of those things is pay your taxes.

[_ttg]

if the alternative to 'selling out' is making your business unviable and having to beg the internet for handouts(essentially), then yes, you should "sell out" every time.

[wonderwonder]

Selling out is easy when your children have no food.

[voiper1]

Surely there's AI usage that's not morally reprehensible.

Models that are trained only on public domain material. For value add usage, not simply marketing or gamification gimmicks...

[qingcharles]

How many models are only trained on legal[0] data? Adobe's Firefly model is one commercial model I can think of.

[0] I think the data can be licensed, and not just public domain; e.g. if the creators are suitably compensated for their data to be ingested

[nrhrjrjrjtntbt]

I wonder if there is a pivot where they get to keep going but still avoid AI. There must be for a small consultancy.

[sddhrthrt]

> "a self-inflicted wound"

"AI products" that are being built today are amoral, even by capitalism's standards, let alone by good business or environmental standards. Accepting a job to build another LLM-selling product would be soul-crushing to me, and I would consider it as participating in propping up a bubble economy.

Taking a stance against it is a perfectly valid thing to do, and the author is not saying they're a victim due to no doing of their own by disclosing it plainly. By not seeing past that caveat and missing the whole point of the article, you've successfully averted your eyes from another thing that is unfolding right in front of us: majority of American GDP is AI this or that, and majority of it has no real substance behind it.

[aylmao]

I too think AI is a bubble, and besides the way this recklessness could crash the US economy, there's many other points of criticism to what and how AI is being developed.

But I also understand this is a design and web development company. They're not refusing contracts to build AI that will take people's jobs, or violate copyright, or be used in weapons. They're refusing product marketing contracts; advertising websites, essentially.

This is similar to a bakery next to the OpenAI offices refusing to bake cakes for them. I'll respect the decision, sure, but it very much is an inconsequential self-inflicted wound. It's more amoral to fully pay your federal taxes if you live in the USA for example, considering a good chunk are ultimately used for war, the CIA, NSA, etc, but nobody judges an average US-resident for paying them.