Four Reasons Not to Care About Ethics in Open Source

Coraline Ada Ehmke

Are we, as technologists, responsible for how our work impacts society?

In a 2022 paper, researcher David Widder published a study on the justifications given by open source deepfake developers when asked about the moral implications of their work. Four main arguments were made by the developers to deny their ethical responsibility: the Freedom Zero argument, the Open argument, the Tech is Just a Hammer argument, and the Inevitability argument. But do any of these justifications really ring true, or are they comforting fictions that separate us from the real-world impact of our work?

References and Further Reading

1. "Edmund Berkeley and the Social Responsibilities of Computer Professionals" (Bernadette Longo)
2. "Limits and Possibilities for “Ethical AI” in Open Source: A Study of Deepfakes" (David Gray Widder, Dawn Nafus, Laura Dabbish, and James Herbsleb)
3. The Free Software Definition
4. The Open Source Definition (The Open Source Initiative)
5. The Ethical Source Principles (The Organization for Ethical Source)
6. The Post-Meritocracy Manifesto
7. "Composite Ethical Frameworks for IOT and Other Emerging Technologies" (Max Senges, Patrick Spaulding Ryan Ph.D., Richard S. Whitt)
8. Ethical Intellectual Property (Corporate Accountability Lab)