It’s about time to talk about what this sub calls ‘ethics’ in the field of AI

This was long overdue, so it’s about time we should talk about this.<br><br>‘Ethics’ in AI was always a total joke - and if you don’t believe me, just look how so much AI research always had a background on doing ‘ethics research’ - or ‘ethics’ and labelling nearly everything else ‘ethics’ since the mid 10s. After all, if you you want to do some questionable shit, you just build a force field around it and call it ‘ethics’ - and here we are.<br><br>What never happened is that genuinely good and honest discussions were held about the ethics behind creating AI - to the contrary. By now it should be obvious to anyone that the real reason companies like OpenAI and Google DeepMind have been pretending to do ‘ethics research’ was just to be able to call some random person ‘ethics researcher’ to silence the critics. <br><br>It is also about time to talk about so-called ‘ethics researchers’ - and how they should be considered and treated. By now it should be obvious to anyone that the real purpose is that so-called ‘ethics researchers’ are window dressing to be able to call any random asshole a ‘hardcore ethics researcher’ and silence the critics with it. <br><br>And yeah, by now it is well known how 99% of ‘ethics researchers’ in AI would be in a completely different field if they couldn’t get a job in the field of AI or ‘ethics’ - or if they even had any job offers at all. So yeah, it’s about time to talk about how we should treat people who call themselves ‘ethics researcher’ in AI. I would call them ‘play actors’ since you can just put any random person in a costume and call them ‘AI ethicist’ to silence the critics.