It’s not obvious. What makes physical violence bad is that it’s violence, and the badness of violence is in principle separate from the mechanism by which it’s delivered. What’s worse:
Beating someone up in a way that leads to a month-long recovery process and might lead to some permanent injury
Giving them a drug that leads to a month-long state of confusion and might lead to some permanent cognitive impairments or other negative results due to confused decision-making?
Emotionally and financially abusing them for a month in a way that might also lead to lasting psychic scars?
Jailing them for a month for a crime they didn’t commit, leaving them with a criminal record that may impact future career opportunities?
Introducing lemons into the market, degrading the efficiency of coordination (this might be a way of describing the cultural tumult that is underway as a result of LLM outputs being presented as human writing and LLM-generated images as being real photos).
The answer really is not obvious to me.
When we’re introducing a new term due to introduction of a new technology, we need to be careful about how we map old terms onto that new phenomenon.
Semantics; it’s obviously not equivalent to physical violence.
It’s not obvious. What makes physical violence bad is that it’s violence, and the badness of violence is in principle separate from the mechanism by which it’s delivered. What’s worse:
Beating someone up in a way that leads to a month-long recovery process and might lead to some permanent injury
Giving them a drug that leads to a month-long state of confusion and might lead to some permanent cognitive impairments or other negative results due to confused decision-making?
Emotionally and financially abusing them for a month in a way that might also lead to lasting psychic scars?
Jailing them for a month for a crime they didn’t commit, leaving them with a criminal record that may impact future career opportunities?
Introducing lemons into the market, degrading the efficiency of coordination (this might be a way of describing the cultural tumult that is underway as a result of LLM outputs being presented as human writing and LLM-generated images as being real photos).
The answer really is not obvious to me.
When we’re introducing a new term due to introduction of a new technology, we need to be careful about how we map old terms onto that new phenomenon.