There are certainly some differences but is one really more ethical than the other? If anything I feel that (for example) manufacturing a gun is much less likely to carry any ethical implications than training someone to use it might.
I did a cursory search and it seems to be as regulated as restaurants are. There's an application process and on site inspections, but that's about it. The only thing notable is background checks.
And at least in the US if you're a hobbyist at home then there's ~no regulation whatsoever beyond the requirement to permanently affix a serial number and to keep accurate records.
I don't see the difference when it comes to the ethics of making a tool available to the world or teaching someone something. Like who cares if it was a hobbyist versus a professional tutoring outfit that taught someone expressing an open interest in committing terrorism about the chemistry of explosives? The two hypothetical teachers are equally at fault as far as I'm concerned.
Because an individual has free will and agency, and scale matters.
If you teach someone chemistry, that someone probably has sense to not use it for criminal purposes. If you have a track record of teaching future terrorists specifically, you will be shut down. Crucially, before you educate them en masse.
If you’re comparing that to a tool that essentially educates thousands, millions of people, with no KYC, you bet budding terrorists are going to be disproportionately represented within that group.
So then you acknowledge my point and our discussion does include homegrown LLMs?
But you raise an interesting point. It seems the ethics of LLM manufacturing is somewhat different than that of weapons (or other tool) manufacturing due to the ability of the LLM to convey knowledge. Still, I'm unconvinced of your position. Consider that we regulate neither the publishing nor dissemination of chemistry textbooks. Surely an LLM teaching someone chemistry falls into the same general category?
Homegrown LLMs seem unlikely to be used by a significant fraction of LLM users, but yeah, there’s a blurred line.
> Surely an LLM teaching someone chemistry falls into the same general category?
I think the scale and the effort might break the analogy. Teaching yourself means a degree of patience and certain personality traits that would be rarer in a malicious person (along the lines of “a sufficiently smart person wouldn’t need to be a criminal to succeed”), with exceptions of course. Being taught by a teacher implies a degree of KYC and care about who you are. Being served on a plate the specific information on how to manufacture something dangerous bypasses those barriers, which I think changes the equation.
