Well… “ethical” is a thorny subject. The underlying imagenet technology was still built on mturk, and usage still drives up the usage figures for these billion dollar art-thieves to use in their investment rounds. It’s still environmentally catastrophic compared to regular image searches, and it’s still used by proponents of the technology to normalize its use, so they can promote it to replace jobs.
A good deal of the “ethical” problems with generative-AI are baked into the technology itself… but it’s certainly more acceptable than other uses.
Oh for sure, but let’s say I’m running the model locally using my GPU instead of, say, using it to play a game using that GPU. It’s all technically wasteful, but by that standard everything we use our computers for are wasteful. I’m not even sure if running it locally counts for usage statistics, either, although I suppose download counts could.
Granted, I don’t like the wasteful use of AI models (especially unsolicited bullshit from copilot) and I certainly don’t like the use of stolen material for corporate gain, but I’ve never been against individuals using pirated software, music, video, etc, for personal usage even before AI.
Don’t have an argument against it normalizing the behavior, though. I’d like to believe there’s an ethical way to adopt new technology without screwing some people over, but that’s probably not possible under capitalism.
