Hi, I work for a company that produces products for the U.S. military. I was planning to use prodigy for an in-house NLP project to improve failure analysis when I saw prodigy's policy against providing licenses to company's associated with the military or intelligence.
As my project is small and I will be the only one generating annotations, am I allowed to purchase a personal license (that I will not distribute) for my project, or would your team prefer I look elsewhere for an annotation tool.
I want to honor your moral policies and apologize if the question itself is ignorant to your views. Thanks
Hi Samuel,
Thanks for the upfront question. The primary reason for usage restriction for law enforcement, military and intelligence purposes is the lack of practical oversight of such uses of AI.
Many companies can buy a product and put it to unethical or illegal use. This concern is not specific to AI. The general social contract we all operate under is that vendors don't need to do extensive due diligence on their customers to ensure their products are not being used for eventual harm, beyond a fairly minimal standard of negligence. This makes efficient commerce possible --- the alternate system would make everything extremely expensive. What we do instead as a society is agree laws and regulatory frameworks, and we expect the government to enforce them.
While these oversight mechanisms are far from perfect, we don't see anything equivalent even pretending to function within sensitive government areas --- in particular those associated with law enforcement, the military and intelligence. In these areas governments generally assert a right to secrecy and immunity from civil legal action. If there's no functioning oversight mechanism, we see the prevention of harm as our responsibility. With no way to constrain (or even inquire about) how our products are used, we opt to simply refuse the sale.
Contractors working in association with the military are a grey area. Some of the same concerns apply, while others don't. On the one hand, you're typically still working under security clearance, giving much stronger legal enforcement of secrecy. On the other hand, it's still a private enterprise.
I hope this explains the rationale behind the policy a little better. You'll have a better view of the project, so I'll leave it to you to make the final determination of whether the sale should qualify.
Hi Matthew,
Thank you for the clear and detailed answer. I totally understand your rationale and I appreciate your trust to allow me to make the final decision. This project does not cause harm and I promise to personally follow you and your company's policies to prevent misuse of AI and provide that oversight.
On another note, I want to thank you for your kindness and patience with my upfront question, haha.