Posted by altmanaltman 4 hours ago
(1) We all know that doing what's best for oneself does not count as doing something "good" or "right". Even the worst psychopath or monster will do what is best for themselves. "What benefits me" is not a principle on which to decide how to act morally.
(2) The most basic moral principle might be "do no harm", i.e. you are free to do whatever you want as long as you do not cause others harm. This is something that most normal human beings instinctively recognize as a valid way to decide between good and bad actions. This is the absolute minimum moral compass you must possess in order to participate in civilized society.
(3) One level up is the golden rule, or "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" or treating others the same way you would want to be treated. This is generally recognized by many religions as the gold standard for what it means to be a good human being.
(4) Kant goes one level further. He says, basically: "before you do something, ask yourself: if everyone else in the world did what you're about to do as a matter of course, will it make the world better or worse? If it makes the world worse, then don't do it". This is a very basic formulation of Kant's Categorical Imperative.
This is not the Categorical Imperative. What you're describing is more like Rule Utilitarianism. Kantian ethics is deontological, not consequentialist.
In what sense? There's a sense in which there's no moral law without rational agents, but Kant himself is explicit about the "good will" being entirely independent of intended or obtained ends. In other words, no rational agent needs to benefit (or be harmed) in Kant's system for individuals to be morally blameworthy or praiseworthy.
(See GMS 4:394 for the "jewel" analogy, which is most popularly cited as evidence for Kant's position on this.)
Also, the author claims:
> No AI was used to generate the text for this article. The cover image and the voiceover in the audio version of the article is AI-generated. The cover image is made using Google Gemini’s latest image model while the voiceover uses OpenAI’s tts models.
You can slap an arbitrary disclaimer on anything; it doesn’t mean it’s genuine.
https://www.bensparks.co.uk/talk/the-sacred-geometry-of-chan...
Damn. Please never stop writing
I suppose it helps to focus on the core of someone's strength, and the core of the content they are sharing.
You could be a great engineer and a great blogger, but have no skill in making graphics. If you made the artistic choice to add AI-generated art to an excellent engineering blog post, I would forgive it -- assuming it wasn't detracting in some important way.
Overall, the human skill of editing - particularly excluding that which is not additive - does remain key though.
I will say in this case, I don't know the pop song well enough to know if the AI-generated image is super relevant, or just random.
EDIT: I'm guessing it's "Kant"[0] in the image, listening to modern music. Ah... at first I thought it was like, George Washington.
The real problem is that "serious content creators" believe (as far as I can tell anyway) that they must have a cover image to make the article appealing or set the mood or whatever. They might even be right as far as the actually reader is concerned, but either way this is the real disease, and it's decades older than LLMs.
Anyway, it is their piece, their website, so they choose how to structure it. I just don't like the plague of hero images in general. I can understand a hero image that adds something relevant, or even simply has some artistic value in itself. But both stock images and AI-generated ones add neither.
https://talkhouse.com/neil-hagerty-royal-trux-pussy-galore-t...