Am I corrupted?

Corruption is by definition behavior (often illegal) where someone gets benefits for disregarding their duties. It is also attached to the general concepts of betrayal, decay, rot, and departure from what is pure, simple, or correct.

Now let's say you have values and principles that you live by in your professional work. You have cultivated them over years. They have proven to be valuable and helpful. You agree with others on these principles. You taught them to newcomers in your field.

Such a principle might be: "when I base my work on other people's work, I give them proper credit". That includes proper citation of academic work, proper use of licensed material like program code, images, and graphics, and quoting journalistic sources correctly.

There is of course anyway a legal obligation to do so. If you do it for that reason only, that is not a principle - it is the response to an annoyance. If you do it, because it is the right thing to do, that's a principle.

Here is your check: if the legal obligation disappears, and you still do the same thing, you have preserved your values. If not, you have corrupted your principles.

The legal obligation might disappear because you can now use an AI model that was trained on these sources but hides the illegal harvesting. You might even be forced by your employer to use that model. Now it becomes really difficult to even find out what the original sources were.

The AI sources deceive you into thinking that there were no original sources or that the AI model itself is the source.

You might fall for this deception. More likely, you will fall for self-deception by accepting that there were no sources to begin with or "the one big source" was everything and everybody on the internet.

Of course, if you take the time and effort to think about it, you will recognize the delusion.

The self-deception has corrupted your values and principles.

You cannot detect self-deception

The devious part about self-deception is that you are not only the deceiver but also the deceived. Since detecting a deception (especially from a "reliable" source as yourself) is much more difficult than creating one, you can typically not detect self-deception.

You need friends, family, co-workers, etc. to help you. Actually, you need people that you trust more than yourself.

Very few people have that - so AI wins.

Walk of shame

Here are some engineering values and principles that a lot of my friends and co-workers held up in the past (and were proud of) and how they became subject to dismissal as soon as AI made it more convenient to ignore them:

• "Pay for what you buy" - until the AI does the piracy for you.
• "Take responsibility for your code" - until code is no longer my personal artefact
• "Keep teammates up to date of your changes" - until I'm not even up to date myself
• "Extract the concept from the implementation" - until there is no longer a concept
• "Less is more" - until more is more
• "Think through the implications" - until there is no more time to think
• "Set goal via tests" - until tests themselves are generated to comply with the implementation
• "Understand the dependencies" - until there are too many
• "Do not lie" - until convenient
• the list goes on ...

I hope that some of these values might survive or can be resurrected after the storm.

It's even worse

Sadly, the corruption is even worse - and I am not even mentioning the economic, political, and social damage. It affects long-standing friendships.

It is a matter of pure self-preservation that I do not join the dark side. My harshest critic stares in my face every morning while I brush my teeth. He will never go away.

I hope that by recognizing this particularly devious fallacy, one or the other friend might find their way back to the engineering craft. I hope as least as much that management will recognize that "we will force AI on everybody" is a corruption indicator since you disregard your duties to your organization and employees for some perceived short-term benefit.