Presentation

Ethics of Large Language Models and Code Generation
Presenter
DescriptionProgramming scientific computing systems is a complex job constantly under labor pressures. Financial incentives from industry and potential work visa and export control restrictions make employment in this sector even more difficult. With the appearance of LLM-based code generators like CoPilot, several ethical concerns arise. First, how are these models trained and created? The training data comes from potentially illegally used materials, such as open source code that requires attribution, but none is generated. Second, the correctness of these systems requires higher skills to validate the code generated does exactly and only what the requestor wants. Third, security flaws introduced by poisoning the source pool on repositories like Github make relying on the code safety questionable.

This talk will delve into some of the ethical problems with these code generators and whether or not it is ethical to use them, trust or not, to achieve the advancement of scientific inquiry. The chronic labor shortages encourage using these tools as a short cut, but is that wise, ethical, or even useful?
TimeWednesday, June 510:30 - 11:00 CEST
LocationHG D 1.2
Event Type
Minisymposium
Domains
Applied Social Sciences and Humanities