A lot of us here hate AI because of how it was built: training data gathered without the creators’ explicit, opt-in consent, data centers that negatively affect communities’ access to clean water and energy, a technology design that is inherently prone to hallucinations, etc. At least, those are the main reasons why I hate it.
I think I might actually want to support an AI project if I thought it was being done right. Maybe we could get more people away from exploitative models if there was a non-exploitative alternative.
So what would it take to build AI ethically, in your opinion? And do you know of anyone trying to build AI without these issues?
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Anil Dash claims he’s made an ethical AI: https://www.anildash.com/2026/04/28/one-good-ai-is-here/
I haven’t taken the time to verify his claims personally, it sounds like a reasonable attempt:
What’s good? Something that checks every box I can think of for our most immediately positive goals: it’s trained entirely with data that were consensually gathered; it’s completely open source and open weights, so anybody can examine it to know exactly how it works and what biases or flaws it might have; it’s designed to run on ordinary computers that normal people have access to — including those that can run entirely on renewable and responsible energy sources. And it is controlled by creators, not extractors, people who are inarguably on the side of artists and creatives and those who make art and culture in the world, designed to support and enable and empower their expression. No billionaires or guests of Epstein’s island were involved in the creation of this technology.
Do you mean any AI, or text-generating LLMs?
I am fairly certain Cornell built BirdNET / Merlin Bird ID song identification using recordings in the public domain or with permissive licenses.
Same goes for iNaturalist and Seek using volunteer-submitted and identified photos.
So it’s possible to built domain-specific models with fewer ethical issues, but the push is for bullshit generators, unfortunately.
if it were built outside of a capitalist system and in a way that is in ecological balance with the planet
I don’t think we can or should. Its promise is only dwarfed by its danger. We’re building our successor species.
No we are not. LLMs are nowhere near being on the path to an actual artificial intelligence. Nor is any other “AI” technology.
Step one was missed, see: define what “intelligence” actually means.
Firstly I don’t think LLMs are “AI”, secondly it’s companies and people who have ethics, not software. Someone could use a Linux PC to trigger a nuclear bomb that doesn’t mean that Linux is unethical.
I mean the energy usage in the face of global climate catastrophe is pretty unethical regardless of source of training material or what the LLM is used for
Companies are the ones doing that.
Running an LLM inherently requires a large amount of energy. Whether locally run or in a large data center. Companies just make it happen on an insane scale.
They aren’t what is unethical. Capitalism is unethical as it is inherently exploitative because that is how you maximize profit, or gain profit in the first place.
What a novel and unique perspective. IDGAF
Sorry who are you?
Sorry who are you? AI can suck dez nutz
There’s https://apertvs.ai/ probably as close as it gets. Government funded, made by universities. Afaik its datacenter is powered by hydro. But it is an academic project, so still uses common crawl and other publicly available datasets, which is considered ok practice in academia but still means consent is opt out, if something is publicly available. And of course no one uses this, because no marketing and it’s not as ‘good’ as models trained on stolen data.
Plus you could still argue that the energy and tax payer money could be better spent elsewhere.
Universities are the tip of the baby killing military industrial complex. you people are all so silly. There is no such thing as ethical AI.
Well first you plug in a toaster with a extention cord not plugged into a GFI outlet, next you fill up the tub and the last step is you get into that tub with said toaster as you submerge. Thats how you build ethical AI
Pay for all the content you train the model on
Or only use your own data, which would make it useless. I thought about RAGs but Wikipedia says:
These documents supplement information from the LLM’s pre-existing training data
It seems that RAGs use stolen data anyway.
And It still wouldn’t solve the issue that managers demand 10 times more work for free, it wouldn’t stop making workers crazy with the flood of reviews in programming, and execs wouldn’t stop dreaming of laying off everyone.
YOUR data was already stolen to build these models. You are already being actively exploited. This applies to everyone who has ever put something out onto the internet. The best way to usher in an era of ethical AI is to use the tools that exist now in whatever way necessary to ensure we beat the fascists worldwide and then restore sanity to the law.
For example an AI search assistant not biased by big corps, it use webcontent in realtime, not an own knowledge base with stolen content, LLM only to interprete correct the user input for a semantic search, better if also use renevable energy.
