AI Ethics is being narrowed on purpose, like privacy was

Data scraping, IP, and creator rights

• Strong disagreement over whether mass web-scraping for training is ethical or “just fair use.”
• Some argue legal fights will only create data brokers; even if fees are paid, jobs still vanish.
• Others say being able to exclude one’s work from training preserves a unique style and livelihood.
• Counterargument: individual “styles” aren’t legally protected, are easy to imitate, and trying to regulate style would create absurd lawsuits and favor big corporations.
• Several comments highlight how current practices disproportionately “rip the small fish to feed the big fish,” and question licenses explicitly forbidding derivatives being ignored.
• A minority call for IP abolition entirely; others say that’s unrealistic and would never be accepted by large rights-holders.

Ethics vs safety and alignment framing

• Discussion distinguishes “ethics” (power, racism, labor, governance) from “safety” (preventing model-caused harm, often in speculative AGI scenarios).
• Some see “AI safety” as a corporate rebranding that sidelines work on real-world harms (bias, surveillance, discrimination) in favor of sci‑fi “God AI” narratives that attract funding and deflect regulation.
• Others defend focus on novel risks from powerful models and reject claims that existing human-centered frameworks suffice.

Asimov’s laws, alignment, and constraints

• Long debate on Asimov’s Three Laws: many insist they were deliberately constructed as flawed plot devices, not a serious ethics framework.
• Others say even as fiction they usefully highlight that multiple stakeholders exist (creators, owners, society) and that hard constraints might still be preferable to today’s vague “alignment.”
• Several point out that modern LLMs are trained via data, not hand-coded rules; they behave more like partially socialized children than logical robots, making simple rule-sets inapplicable and hard to enforce.

Role and legitimacy of “ethicists”

• Some view many AI ethics/safety people as non-technical PR actors obsessed with “governance structures,” not practical mitigations or benchmarks.
• Others counter that there is a substantial technically competent safety community and that dismissing all ethicists ignores serious work on neural circuits, bias, and system-level risks.

Whose ethics and value pluralism

• Commenters repeatedly ask “whose ethics?” and worry about hidden ideological or religious agendas embedded in guardrails.
• One camp favors heavily constrained, non-agentic tools; another prefers uncensored local models and rejects corporate “moralizing” overrides.

Concrete harms vs speculative futures

• Many emphasize present-day issues: deepfakes, voice cloning, content moderation bias, job loss, data extraction, and even AI scrapers DDoS‑ing small sites.
• Others worry that focusing only on near-term harms or only on sci‑fi scenarios both misallocate attention; systemic incentives under capitalism are seen as driving all forms of misuse.