I didn't get the impression that the man here was looking at LLMs as some fantastical threat. It seems like his concern was about offloading his thinking and decision making to AI, which seems pretty non-fantastical.
Can't that be done without a performative "religious exemption"? You don't need that to say "yeah, I'm not using this stuff." I imagine in practice all this will accomplish is pissing people off who are already stressed about AI.
I think I understand what you mean, but to me the exemption doesn't seem performative. It seems like the equivalent of him talking to his employer and having them agree to not force him to use tech he is concerned about, he just used a particular legal avenue to justify it as part of that discussion. It may be performative in the sense that it also got attention (e.g., in the form of this article), but in this case even that part of it seems like it could be a useful precedent for others who may be considering a similar route.
Then again, maybe even seeing it as _slightly_ performative, potentially, is overly pessimistic. It may seem performative simply because it's novel, but if he legitimately considers this part of his religious beliefs and his employer (seemingly) agrees, what is performative about exercising his rights like many other people of other religions do?
Right, but does a business/company owe you the right to never require usage of AI to do your job (and by extension, owe you that job under those terms)?
I did not take that position. You asked if US citizens could refuse AI without religious exemption, possibly suggesting the dramatics are unnecessary, and I answered that I could not.
Was he being forced or compelled to offload his thinking to a machine?
I probably don’t share his sentiments, but that’s no different from being compelled to think in certain mandated ways (offloading being just a particular case of it), which is certainly a bad idea. If that was the case, I find it weird that he used a religious exemption mechanism, but glad he can act and think freely, the way he desires.
However, he may not have a choice of tool use or peers, and be compelled to send work to, or process results done by a non-human system, if that’s a part of his organization system (external to him with regards to duties and responsibilities). To grant him an exemption would be to discriminate upon others, no different how he can’t refuse to work with, say, a Satanist. Or a cyborg transhumanist. If that’s the case and he just refuses to feed his thinking (his part of the job) to an AI (not his part of the job), then that’s him being a zealot pushing his religious views on others. In such a case, I can quite clearly see why he went for a religious exemption, huh.
His own part of the job, his responsibilities - yes, of course he can’t be compelled on how he does it. Anything outside of that - nope, his religious beliefs end there, not his thinking - not for him to say how to do it, or refuse to interact.
