Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]
There’s a gradient from legitimate damning criticism of corporate behavior, to vaguely defensible moralizing against the technology itself, to identarian chest-beating as ingroup performance. The latter mindset is most common by far and freely borrows from the other two.
I’ve been legitimately surprised when makers on Youtube casually or comedically admit they vibe-coded their latest gizmo. It must invite harassment. Like okay, you built an animatronic mousepad that makes an aimbot out of your actual hand, but there’s one drop of AI in there, so it’s slop. And if anyone elaborated an ethical justification for using a program that does a thing, that would be ‘protesting too much.’ As if trying to pre-empt any tired haranguing is just conscience of guilt.
The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer. The podcast Final v3 rightly mocks Coca-Cola for thinking their text-to-video ad deserves a “behind the scenes” featurette, but when Julian mentions efforts to create models from original licensed input, he immediately scoffs “like that’d be ‘ethical.’” My guy, if a solution isn’t relevant, the complaint is pretense.