Adobe’s employees are typically of the same opinion of the company as its users, having internally already expressed concern that AI could kill the jobs of their customers. That continued this week in internal discussions, where exasperated employees implored leadership to not let it be the “evil” company customers think it is.
This past week, Adobe became the subject of a public relations firestorm after it pushed an update to its terms of service that many users saw at best as overly aggressive and at worst as a rights grab. Adobe quickly clarified it isn’t spying on users and even promised to go back and adjust its terms of service in response.
For many though, this was not enough, and online discourse surrounding Adobe continues to be mostly negative. According to internal Slack discussions seen by Business Insider, as before, Adobe’s employees seem to be siding with users and are actively complaining about Adobe’s poor communications and inability to learn from past mistakes.
It‘s exactly this dangerous mindset that‘s riding us in some AI service hellhole. Too many super talented developers have told themselves exactly that instead of standing up for their principles or even allowing themselves to have principles in the first place.
Only recently have they started leaving companies like OpenAI and taking a stance because they‘re actually seeing what their creation is used for and with how little care for human life it‘s been handled.
Of course many critics knew this was headed towards military contracts and complete Enshittification. It was plain to see OpenAI founders aren‘t the good guys but „someone else would do it anyway“ kept the underlings happy. This deterministic fallacy is also why anyone still works for Meta or Google. It‘s a really lazy excuse.
Is this true though? From my understanding, Altman was able to overrule the board largely because the employees (especially the one who had been with the company for more than 1-2 years) were worried about their stock options.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the vast majority of the OpenAI team are ghouls just like Altman, that fundamentally lack humanity (incapable of honesty, inability to tell right from wrong, incapable of empathy).
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean this in the Hollywood sense, like the evil antagonists in say star wars, I am sure they come off as “normal” during a casual conversation. I am referring to going deeper and asking subtle questions referring to matters of ethics and self-enrichment in an off the record environment. They will always come up with some excuse to justify their greed as being “for the betterment of humanity” or some other comical word salad.
You know I‘m worried you might be exactly on point with this assumption. I still give some of them the benefit of doubt because humans can „reason“ themselves into pretty dangerous things by appealing to authority and the like. Doesn‘t make all of them evil but sure as hell way too gullible for the field they‘re working in.
Happy cake day!