> there's probably no ethical way to use contemporary AI when it is "out in front" doing anything of consequence. Your "AI is a tool and nothing more" frames ethical use of the technology for me.

I've thought a lot about how to safely deploy autonomous systems (even did a whole PhD on the topic, lol).

I think one can ethically deploy a system that has some degree autonomy. It takes a lot of work to do right. And the tooling for LLM-based systems isn't quite as mature as the tooling for e.g. control systems. Part of this is because so many resources in AI safety are misspent on problem statements that are myopic or grandiose. Between "don't say pii" and "prevent ASI extinction" there's a hard but tractable control systems-y view of AI safety.

But I don't think there is any sort of fundamental barrier that prevents us from building appropriately constrained LLM-based systems.

> And even then, there are such copyright issues with it. Is there no practical ethical use for AI? Responsible use doesn't equate with ethical use for me.

When responding to a position, especially on the internet, I try to empathize with the thing I'm responding to. Not just understand it, but sort of put myself in a mental state where I have an emotional attachment to my conversation partner's point of view.

With respect to Copyright as a legal framework in my country (USA): despite my best attempts, I really struggle to develop empathy for the viewpoint that LLMs/diffusion models are not a transformative use. I can certainly sympathize, but trying to actually put myself in the shoes of believing that training an LLM is a purely derivative and non-transformational work just feels far too alien. There are so many things that are "clearly transformative" but required so many orders of magnitude less scientific/technical/engineering genius.

Which isn't to say that the US legal system's definition of copyright is the morally correct one.With respect to copyright beyond the US legal system, or beyond legal denotations generally: I can certainly empathize.