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Comment by isostatic | Hacker News Reader

5) Understand ML; concerned - "Why do other people in the ML industry think it's OK to use and store peoples data in without informed consent (which are only those in group 3, and group 1+2 don't have informed consent)"

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Answer to that question: because people are greedy and can't be expected to do the ethical thing. That's why we need government regulation.

That's group 4. How is worrying about informed consent not just a subset of concern about the ethics of collecting training data?

No, group 4 is "we must collect training data, how do we get arround the ethical questions"

Group 5 is "We must be ethical, can we still collect training data"

Different priorities, different outcomes.

I don't see the distinction between "if we wish to do a thing, we must do it ethically when doing so" (4) and "we must act ethically if we do a thing" (5).

If training data can't be collected ethically, do you think group 4 still would, or something? That just seems like trying to out yourself on an ethical high horse without a real distinction in action.

The distinction (from how I'm reading the GP's comment) is that Group 4 presupposes that data collection is necessary, and seeks to minimize unethical means of collecting that data, while Group 5 presupposes that ethics are paramount, and seeks to establish whether or not data collection can actually be ethical at all.

That is: Group 4 would be more willing to compromise ethics if absolutely necessary to get the data said group needs, while Group 5 would be more willing to compromise data collection if there's no ethical way to collect that data.

I agree. The way way the categories are worded essentially excludes the possibility that maybe we shouldn’t be training these models at all. We have banned potentially insightful experiments in both medicine and psychology because they are unethical. I see no reason ML should get a pass.

(4) isn't "if we wish to do a thing, we must do it ethically", it's "we're going to do the thing, how do we make it look ethical."

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