She won a religious exemption from using AI at work

(businessinsider.com)

19 points | by dgellow 5 hours ago

7 comments

  • zzo38computer 8 minutes ago
    (Some people say there is a paywall. I do not get a paywall; the article is displayed, although it also says that it is only available to subscribers but then the article is displayed without needing to subscribe.)

    I would not use LLM and generative AI systems in my programming, for several reasons.

    If you can do it better without the AI, then you should not be forced to use it anyways, or tracked for using it. (Even if you only track the statistics, and how much time it takes, that is not sufficient because you must figure out if the result is actually good, and any other related issues, including e.g. costs and energy usage, testing (not all kind of testing could be automated), kinds of statistical bias, etc.)

    In general, not all kind of religious exemptions would mean you would be able to do the job, but in this case the exemption is reasonable if she is competent at computers; you shouldn't need the AI systems to do it even if they insist that you should. If they have a religious exemption they should show that they could still do that job or else to leave that job (rather than being forced or coerced).

    Thare are both religious and non-religious objections (as well as people of the same religions who would not be opposed, since they are different people even if religion are same; there are also some more nuanced opinions). (There are more religious objections than only Unitarian Universalists and Catholics; I have looked and found some opinions by people of a few other religions, and there are probably more than that too)

  • stratocumulus0 9 minutes ago
    It would be great if people started to claim religious exemptions from making money for oligarchs and politicians. We would see this dumb rule gone in an instant.
  • sameers 4 hours ago
  • stevenalowe 1 hour ago
    “Unitarian Universalist, said she proposed the special treatment in April, citing environmental and ethical objections to AI that don't align with her religious beliefs”

    Ummm… Unitarians in general do not believe in anything specific, so this seems arbitrary but don’t worry she will probably be fired for underperforming soon anyway

    This is the dumbest timeline…

  • lazzlazzlazz 2 hours ago
    I wonder if, some day, people will request exemptions from being productive at work.
    • llbbdd 2 hours ago
      Seems like she has.
  • hungryhobbit 5 hours ago
    Paywall bypass?
  • bko 4 hours ago
    > "I'm writing my code and reviewing my code by hand, which seems crazy to say," said the 34-year-old, who lives in North Carolina and works for a large tech-entertainment company that she described as progressive. "Just two years ago, how else would you do it?"

    Imagine working with this person. At a certain point you just can't do the job. What if a religious Jew wants to work at a butcher shop and refuses the handle pork. Why does everyone feel like they're entitled to do a particular job, making everyone else's life considerably more difficult

    • stevenalowe 1 hour ago
      It’s kinda worse than that - an Orthodox Jew would, by long-standing traditions and teachings, not be expected to touch pork. The same beliefs that make this person object to using AI could easily apply to any cloud-scale service dependent on data centers.

      Like say… Google search (the old non-AI one)

    • marysminefnuf 3 hours ago
      ???? You can code without ai bud. Leave the frummies out of this. What does kashrut have to do with ai.
    • customguy 3 hours ago
      Imagine you ask someone "Can you hand me the butter please? That would be very kind." and they respond "Why does everyone in the world want to have all the butter that ever existed in this very instant?!", and then you ask them what they do for a living while chewing on your dry bread, and they say oh, I write software for pacemakers.