Some more posts on Today's Big Topic
I posted yesterday about the statement against LLM use from IGF jurors, and about the resulting Big Walk conversation that instantly dominated conversation on Bluesky. In that post, I linked to a good blog post from Damon Reece about the same topic.
In the last 24 hours, a bunch of other good blog posts have appeared about the IGF juror statement and Big Walk. You can really, really tell that a lot of people were preparing themselves to discuss this topic. They had ideas, if not entire statements, in the holster, ready to go. So, I do think it's good that the news is finally out, because these are topics that the community needs to discuss!
You should read these other posts:
- A statement from Austin Walker collecting two posts he previously wrote - one from the IGF judging website thread about Big Walk, and another from the juror discussion about their statement.
- A post from Mike Cook about the multiple different angles by which we could approach the question of the IGF's LLM policy, and about the function rules actually have in communities like these
- A backloggd review of Big Walk from Natalie, ex-Cohost poster, about the value of shame as a deterrent. I also would prefer it if LLM users felt a sense of shame and wanted to hide what they'd done!
And again, I gotta turn you to Bruno's recent post on this topic: we are having a fight, and there are sides in the fight. It sucks that it's now possible to have huge, brand-new moral rifts with other members of your scene, community, or team... but this isn't anything unique and special. These kinds of moral conflicts are now the norm. It really, really helps to be able to see this conflict, appreciate the scale of the harm, and acknowledge that using LLMs only for code does not somehow mitigate the harm.