An llm is just a set of rules for cobbling together text. In and of itself, the technology is ethically neutral. Mind you, all ethics are both situational and relative, but what llms do really isn’t ethically any different from something like how your game handles enemy actions, except in scale.

What makes them a nightmare is the wonton fuckery involved in how they’re trained. The open sourced ones lack the abusive and nigh maniacal plundering of human effort that the commercial ones do.

So, when it comes to a locally hosted, open source option, there’s no fundamental difference ethically between an llm, your music player, your word processor, whatever.

Even data centers for generative ai could conceivably be run ethically, given some massive assumptions regarding resource allocation and usage. Mainly in that the energy it takes, and the physical resources, are being allocated to those centres rather than something else. But if everyone agrees in the benefits, then using renewable resources carefully would make it no better or worse than any of the non ai data centers already in existence. I mean, most VPNs are renting either space or hardware from some company that has a data center. “The cloud” is just a giant computer owned and operated by some company somewhere, and that’s a data center.

Yeah, generative systems are way more resource intensive, but we can’t pretend that AWS isn’t doing the same basic thing, just with a different use case. Again, there’s the caveat that that details aren’t the same, I’m talking about principles of ethics, nor the specific technology. We’ve decided that building spaces, or filling existing space, for computing is useful enough to be worth the problems it causes. The consensus hasn’t really been reached that generative ai is also worth it, but in ethical terms, the same framework applies.

So, your concerns are absolutely valid. They are, however, partially met by sustainable implementation