Ethical Concerns of LLMs in Software Development

LLMs have many ethical implications, and we decided to tackle them head on in this video, in the context of using AI assistants to generate code and other software development artifacts.

The brief:
The top issues for using LLMs for software development are: copying the whole internet to build the models, possible copyright infringement in generated code, environmental impact mostly energy and water use, security and data privacy issues, depletion of skills and knowledge due to overuse. Issues such as intentional harm might affect software development, but are less likely. Hard problems like model bias are unlikely to have impact.

However, the likely outcome is that once the law suits are settled in court, none of these issues will prevent the software development industry from using LLMs. The adoption blockers will most likely be related to legal risks and commercial advantage. Assuming the LLMs are useful for parts of software development (which we’ve already seen they are), they will most likely be adopted on a large scale by organizations once the legal hurdles are left behind.

The paper we used as a start for this analysis:

• https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.18841