I am not sure in what neighbourhood you live, but in my village there are hundreds of businesses with strong morals. From the local baker, to the electrician and the construction company. Many keep employees past their prime, they all invest heavily in local community events and sports. The owners don't do this because of money, but because in their view a fulfilled life is one where you serve your community. And yes they want to become rich and make money, but that is not all.

But it appears that is not how your world works. By default any company owner is a homo-sapiens, but a machine that only wants money. Tragically, your cynicism is creating the very world you hate.

So, concerning ethical approaches to model development, there are many things worth looking into: copyright is one, environmental cost is another, and whether there are any additional concerns worth taking into account. The list of these concerns can then be used for decision making, and we can ask things like "given what we want to build, can does picking a location that gives us lower environmental cost add so much time or cost that we can't go for that path?", things like that are't crrazy.

When it comes to how humans interact with AI we can ask things like "would it be better if people could detect AI output?" "how can we alleviate skill loss from excessive AI reliance?" Things like this can decide how the models behave. Imagine if taking concerns like this seriously leads to models that are easy to learn from. At the moment people seem to be moving away from that so as to make distillation difficult, worsening this concern.

I'm not going to try to talk about machine consciousness, but these other things are definitely important questions where someone digging into them could make models interact better with society.

I hate these companies as much as the next guy but this perspective is childish at best, and ignorant at worst.

This is how Ayn Rand's pseudo philosophical mambo jumbo continues to poison tech.

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