Can we agree that “someone would have done this anyway” is a poor justification for one’s actions? That’s what you say when you 1) recognize that you did a bad thing, but 2) don’t want to be blamed for it.

Can we agree that it's fundamentally not a bad thing to develop a technology? If you were a legislator, how would you like to criminalize the development of technology?

Many things can be unethical/immoral without being illegal, and of course there are some technologies that are fundamentally bad.

Tech is such a malleable thing. Let's say that this repo doesn't exist, but repos exist for doing facial tracking on webcam feeds and pictures (for facial recognition), and others for modifying a 3d model according to a facial model output by facial trackers (for 3d avatars).

Let's say that the tech around this DeepFaceLive repo develops to the point that the repo can become just a 10-line file of glue that makes a 3d model that's just a grid plane with a picture on it that moves according to a webcam feed. Such a repo is redundant and anyone that wants this tech can just apply the repos mentioned in the previous paragraph to do the equivalent.

Are those repos now bad? If not, it seems the ethical question can be resolved by some restructuring of code so bad uses are not made so obvious, while being almost as easy.

What technologies are fundamentally bad? I don't know of any outside of perhaps torture devices.

Every single "weapon of mass destruction" is fundamentally bad technology, just for one ultra-easy answer…

Not sure. It may be that the world has become more peaceful since their creation, partly due to their deterrence effect.

The possibility that nuclear deterrence has helped the world to be more peaceful in comparison to the past means that it's not such an easy answer. Hasn't even been a century since nuclear weapons were invented though, so no clear statistics.

That's simply not accurate?

Nuclear weapons and the advent of mutually assured destruction has ushered in a world where many, many, many fewer people die of violent conflict.

Technologies that cause destruction are not congruent with destruction. They change the game such that destruction may actually be prevented by their existence. They are tools, nothing more.

It's possible they have permanently eradicated world war. If that's true, they are not fundamentally bad but in fact really quite great. Only time will tell.

There's surely at least some that you don't know of because their developer made the decision to not release.

No, we can't. Developing "tech" is an action bound by morals like any other action. Cigarette production has tech in it. They don't just grow on trees. It was developed, and keeps being developed, by people well aware of the effects of smoking.

You're opening another can of worms with that example. An adult, informed smoker that takes care to not cause second-hand smoking and that doesn't have any dependents, causes harm only to themselves. If they think that the reduction of stress or whatever else they gain at the tradeoff of their health is worth it, that's their choice. That's part of their bodily autonomy. As such, the tech is still not inherently bad.

You're conveniently dismissing a few concerns and from that drawing the conclusion it isn't inherently bad?

> Can we agree that it's fundamentally not a bad thing to develop a technology?

I do not agree with this assertion.

It’s simply that it’s a kids/teen level argument. “But they did it too!”

Not a lot of thought went into it, is what it usually tells me.

The argument wasn't "Doing something bad is fine because others are", it's "You're trying to stop a bad thing happening by stopping some people upstream from doing something that's perfectly fine. That's going to be ineffective."

But you're right about me not putting a lot of thought. I didn't think this would need more arguing than that.

I still believe that tech is fundamentally neutral, and as such so is its development. Even if a developer intends to give it bad use, the use and development are separate questions.

There are others - not you - who will justify their own actions thusly: the technology existed, its better that the good guys (me - of course) should use it before the bad guys do.

In the space between both equivocations (yours and the other guy's), lies the potential for moral abuse.

That's an even more faulty argument, though, because almost everyone considers themselves one of "the good guys".

Indeed, I think terming yourself in good vs bad as an we vs them terminology makes several biases go undiscovered that if you truly go for objectivity despite your sense of moral leaning is telling you.

What even is a good guy use for Deep fakes besides some memes that get old fast?

This "kid level" argument fooled even Albert Einstein, Roosevelt, and many others. into developing atomic bomb. "If we don't build it Nazis will"

Using it was achieved by different kid level argument "It will prevent even more death and suffering"

The difference is that a lot more thought went into it. Not only that, the presidents domain of expertise and distinction/authority is about these issues. You way down your options, you navigate a complex issue with many factors involved. To prevent more death and suffering was indeed what was one of the most contributing factors of Roosevelts decisions (also to use it, as a direct assault on Japan would have cost a factor more in lives and suffering for both Japan the US)

The difference is of course a well thought out weighing of options, to feel into the issue and make your choice. Taking my immediate surroundings, a lot of people don’t engage in that level of philosophy. Knee jerk reactions are still very common in our species.

Absolutely correct. But that fact doesn't make these arguments acceptable.

I actually don't agree with this. Assume that the following premises are true:

* action x is legal, but results in a worse world for everyone. * doing action x benefits the first 1000 people who do it. * much more than 1000 are capable of doing x, including me. * if I do it now, I will be one of the first 1000.

If these are true, I think one should do action x. I believe one would be completely justified in doing it.

Basically prisoner's dilemma.

I think the answer is inherent to the question of whether it's "justified", and the fact that you're being downvoted.

If Prisoner's Dilemma is played once, the optimal strategy is to defect. If it's repeated an unknown number of times, the optimal strategy is tit-for-tat.

Now, if you're an identifiable actor in a pool of tit-for-tat-players, and you have a history of defecting first, you're going to face opponents who normally play tit-for-tat start to defect against you first, too. In the end, you will end up as one of the worst peformers in the player pool.

So when you're asking if it is "justifiable" to defect in a game like this, it is the same as asking "will I be treated worse if I defect in this game". The downvote confirms this, I think. It means that in this population pool, bad behavior is punished (or people pretend it is)

Now, if defecting can either be done secretly or if you're in a popluation pool where everyone defects anyway, then always-defect is probably the nash equillibrium. In that case, defecting will be seen as justifiable.

> Basically prisoner's dilemma

> (...)In that case, defecting will be seen as justifiable.

Exactly! My argument basically boiled down to this. In certain situations, defecting may be the way to go. I would not blame the defector for doing what is in their best interest.

And “someone would have done this anyway” could very well be what's turning a situation into a prisoner's dilemma, so it could actually be a valid justification in some cases.

But yeah, it could depend on what is meant by "justification" exactly.

This assumes that there is no morality. That there is no merit in not doing something evil even if others will do it in your place.

Hmmm. Not necessarily. I mean if what you did does not change the outcome in any way, then is what you did even evil? If you have no marginal impact, can you ever do good or evil? I am not sure actually.

I realize that this could also apply to lower rank soldiers involved in some war crimes, etc. so I guess it is not that clear cut. But would you blame a random soldier of lowest rank for carrying out terrible orders and not risking himself(or his family)? Well I don't know. I guess I would not.

Of course, the stakes are rarely that high, but the harm done is also rarely that high also.

I don't know that I'd blame them, but I would consider it an act of evil

This is a bit of a tangent, but that's something I never liked about referring to evil things as "inhumane". It seems to me that hurting others in order to help friends, family, or self is very human. In that case, morality is choosing to act against human nature by doing the right thing at the expense of self or loved ones.

For an atheist, moral absolutes are absurd (though still widely held). There are no more an absolute case for saying it's evil for a human child to play before a mouse before killing it, than it is for a kitten to do the same.

Rather, one could argue, morality is a set of emotions, norms, beliefs and rules we have gained through culture and evolution in response to certain behavior patterns. And these can be seen as having a game-theoretical foundation. The rules that assigns the label Evil to someone tends to select people that we (or our ingroup) are in an existential conflict with, at a level where it's either us or them.

For instance, we can have rules that define some patterns of behavior as Evil, and have different set of moral rules for treating people depending on whether they are classified as Evil or not.

> I would not blame the defector for doing what is in their best interest.

I absolutely would. The defector is willingly harming unconsenting others. That the harm would have been caused by someone else anyway doesn't suddenly make it OK.

Not only that, but if some people have ethical and moral considerations about the consequences of x, then those people have an ethical reason to actually do the thing, since the alternative is that the people doing it are those with no ethical or moral consideration.

If a piece of technology is going to be 90% bad 10% good and you can push it to 80% bad then it is completely justifiable to go for it.

I could not disagree more.

That logic is how every atrocity in human history was enabled:

- If I catch this escaped slave, I can get the bounty instead of someone else!

- One of us Auschwitz guards will shoot that escaping prisoner; why shouldn’t I get rewarded for it?

So on and so forth.

It's a self-contradictory and bad-faith argument - it doesn't give another person the opportunity to say no, let alone to not do it.

You’re speaking to the wrong audience. “Someone else would do it anyway” is how everyone here justifies doing unethical shit at FAANG and refusing to earn less than $300k/yr base because “that’s just the industry”. I have no respect for anyone that says this shit with a straight face.

It should also be said that anyone that makes this argument immediately loses their right to complain when governments need to step in and regulate.

You're commenting even after someone has already provided a legitimate good use of this tech, and are the third person to write as if it were established that it's unethical to develop this tech. I never said that it's fine to do unethical things because others will do it anyway, and I wish you wouldn't imply that I did. From the get-go, it was an open discussion whether the development was good/bad/neutral, and my original comment was to clarify that jakelazaroff's comment probably misinterpreted what they quoted from the use of "must".

My position is that development is not unethical. I'm not trying to justify this position because I don't think it needs to be. When I said "others will do it anyway", it's not a justification and my original comment wasn't even about my position on this. My comment was referring to the usefulness of stopping the implicit always-ethically-neutral development of a tech in order to stop the potential misuse of it. I'm saying that even if they stopped the development of this one repo, or a few, or all others implementing this tech, it'd be ineffective. This repo is just one bit of the tech. Most of the tech is in its dependencies. If someone wants it and has nefarious uses in mind, they don't really really need this repo for that.

> My position is that development is not unethical.

I think this is where we disagree at heart. I don't think that development is an ethically neutral act, any more than any other human activity is ethically neutral.

I see this as part of the expansion of knowledge. People conduct research to get a better understanding of the universe. Tech development is about our understanding of what we can do and how. People conducting studies and research can be unethical in the process, same as tech development, but I can't think of knowledge that would be unethical to expand in if the process is ethical. What understanding of the universe would be wrong to obtain if ethical means were available?

If there's none, why is expanding our knowledge of what we can do and how any different?

I draw a distinction that you don't here. Development is not about the expansion of knowledge, it's about producing things. Science is about the expansion of knowledge.

As a society, we very often conflate the two, but they're really very different things.

They're very intertwined. A paperclip factory produces things; they don't do tech development (shouldn't do much at least). Tech development is about pushing the edge. Science, obtaining more knowledge about the universe we have to work with, helps, but it's also about finding new applications for what we've already known.

Tech development doesn't necessitate the production of things, even intangible ones. Technology development in the form of new optimization techniques in existing software for e.g. rendering 3d models or searching data faster or whatever is not producing things, but it's still tech development.

Technology is the practical application of knowledge about the world. Science is the acquisition of such knowledge. There certainly can be an overlap in the Venn diagram here, but the distinction remains valid and important.

In any case, I was not saying that your perspective is incorrect. I was just saying that my worldview seems rather different from yours.

If I can become rich instead of someone else, and the damage will be done either way, it seems perfectly rational if I can avoid any actual legal punishment (I don’t care about people on Twitter being angry with me, Twitter isn’t real life) to push the big red button and reap the rewards.

Once I’m rich and powerful I can afford to be ethical, isn’t that the way of billionaires anyway?

If a person isn't ethical in the first place (as proven by becoming wealthy through unethical means), they certainly aren't going to become ethical after they're rich.

Right. Tell that to Einstein, who just before Hiroshima realized it was not such a good argument.

That is a nice piece of history.

Ethics is important. And one consequence is: I may die but at least it was not because I made it possible.

Yeah, theory of relativity and tech with use cases mostly in porn and fraud aren't really the same thing.

Your response doesn't make any sense. Care to elaborate?

Just search "Atrioc" in google and read any article. So far, this tech's main use is porn with people who do not want to do porn, who do not post adult content, who did not ever consent to their faces being used for adult content.

The second use of this technology is fraud. Go read the issue and the comments linked in the post.

And you should not even need this much info. The simple fact that they mention "mrdeepfake" as one of the 4 communication groups, the second after their Discord server tells you how good this tech does to the world.

As GeorgeMD pointed out, there's some required reading.

What George is saying makes total sense. Why I had commented on your post was I couldn't understand your reasoning that somehow relativity and the 2 bombs couldn't have happened without each other I found that quite bizarre..

> that somehow relativity and the 2 bombs couldn't have happened without each other I found that quite bizarre..

Sounds about right, because that's literally not what I said.

It’s not relativity. Einstein pushed first for the american atom bomb because “the germans will make it anyway”. Then he realised that it was way too harmful and recanted.

Nothing to do with relativity, just with “if I don’t do it others will”.

What it boils down to is: If someone else will just do it, then wait and let them do it. If it has morally objectionable consequences, either you care about that and do not involve yourself, or you don't and you go ahead. But then you cannot say you didn't get your hands dirty.

While Einstein regretted working on nuclear weapons, the work they did there is equally responsible for the many lives saved by nuclear power, which he also appreciated. Also, it was the first 20% of the work towards nuclear fusion.

Technology is not evil or good.

Even this technology could be great. Jacky Chan, for example, is not going to make any more movies. But I want more of those movies. This very technology would allow that.

Does Jacky Chan have any saying in this? Or is anyone on the internet free to use his face however they like?

Yea, tech is not evil or good, it's all about how people use it and so far, deep fake tech has only been used for evil. From deep fake porn to fraud. The only not evil thing about this are the memes, but we can live without deep fake memes just fine.

> he work they did there is equally responsible for the many lives saved by nuclear power

This is still on-going. There are thousands of nuclear heads on standby. His technology might end human civilization or even the human race as we know it.

> Technology is not evil or good.

Of course, it's not. Technology is real. Evil and good are imaginary human-brain constructs.

The Nuclear bomb in itself was a lifesaver in the way that the US nor the USSR ever dared to attack each other because of the potential consequences.

Without Nuclear bombs a "hot" 3rd world-war would have probably happened.

Also no country who has nuclear weapons was ever attacked.

> Technology is not evil or good.

But a given technology may be much more suited to doing evil than doing good.

> Jacky Chan, for example, is not going to make any more movies. But I want more of those movies. This very technology would allow that.

Which is something that I would consider ethically wrong unless Jackie Chan consented to it.