The Enabler Of Casual, Carefree Malfeasance

Scenario: You’re at your public library. You glance over at a chair that somebody vacated about twenty minutes ago, and you spot a wallet. What do you do with it?

What a question! You pick it up and you immediately hand it in to a librarian. Your ethical duty is so clear that the alternatives probably didn’t even occur to you. There happened to be $27 in cash inside, but you were unaware of this. You probably didn’t even bother looking. $10 or $1000, it’s all the same: you turn it in.

Let’s change this scenario up. It’s not a wallet. It’s $27 in cash, folded in half, with a paper clip holding it together.

Even though the wallet from the first scenario contained exactly the same amount of money…it hits a little differently:

• There’s no ID or credit cards. Tracking down the owner won’t be easy, or guaranteed.
• $27 isn’t a trivial amount of money, but it isn’t substantial, either. It’s possible that the owner will just write it off to carelessness and bad luck.
• Even if the owner thinks “Oh, I must have lost it in the library,” the owner might just assume that whoever found it pocketed the cash. Driving back to the library is probably a waste of time and $1.72 in gas money.

You should still hand the money in. But even an upstanding citizen might have to walk themselves through their options before they do the right thing.

And if this upstanding citizen thought it through and concluded that this small windfall was just part of the Great Lost Cash Redistribution System, and that this was one of those days when they get to draw from the pool instead of paying into it? I wouldn’t judge them too harshly. This is “casual malfeasance.” Keeping the cash isn’t ideal, but the finder might have scrutinized the situation and concluded in the end that no real harm would be done.

(I’d hand the money in. But if I’d found it in the street…yeah, I wouldn’t go around knocking on doors and I wouldn’t drop it off at the police station, either. I’d take it almost directly to a good diner. I'd order an epic breakfast, and convince myself that I can wash away any stain of sin upon my soul by leaving a 40% tip. Such things make a big impression upon Saint Peter. You will recall that his job in Heaven is to work behind a counter.)

AI is an enabler of Casual Malfeasance

In fact, I did find a wallet at the library recently. And of course, I did hand it right in.

But I’m bringing up the concept because it’s occurred to me that “enabling acts of Casual Malfeasance” is one of the lesser issues of AI.

Y’see…I began sort of stealing comic strips today.

I don’t know if it’s wrong. I do know I wouldn’t be doing it if Gemini hadn’t made it so. Freaking. Easy.

I start every day by reading the morning comic strips, via my paid subscriptions to Comics Kingdom and GoComics. One of my absolute favorites is Dan Schkade’s incredible revival of Flash Gordon. It’s a miraculous thing! He’s taken this 90-year-old adventure comic and turned it into something modern and relevant, without rejecting everything that made the character iconic, or treating it ironically. Schkade took a beautiful old plant and he repotted it in fresh soil.

His Flash Gordon strips ought to be periodically collected and sold in digest form. If they were, they'd be among the best comic books/graphic novels of the year. Schkade says he’s suggested it to King Features Syndicate, but they haven’t done the sane and rational thing yet.

So. Why can’t I just right-click on this strip and save it to a folder every morning? At the end of each month, I could export the folder to a PDF or a CBZ file and make my own collected editions. I’m paying for these daily strips. I’d happily pay for an official monthly digest, if King Features sold one…but they don’t. I won’t be sharing my homemade digests with anybody. So what would be the harm?

“What’s the harm” is a subjective ethical question and therefore unanswerable.

“Why can’t I right-click and save” can be answered definitively: "because the Comics Kingdom site has disabled that trick." The only way to download a strip is to open the browser's developer tools and hunt for the direct URL to today's strip amongst all of the network traffic between the server and the browser.

Thus, saving strips from the site is so difficult that I’m not even tempted to do it.

This morning, while I was reading my daily comics as usual, I remembered that there's a Python library for scraping stuff from websites. I prompted Gemini to write a Python script that grabbed the latest Flash Gordon strip, via Beautiful Soup.

To be honest, my mind wasn’t hellbent on malfeasance. I just kind of wanted to see what Gemini would come up with. Mostly, I was looking for an excuse to stay in bed for another twenty minutes instead of getting dressed and starting my day.

But I’ll be danged! The script worked perfectly, right off the bat:

(I’m just gonna go ahead and call this screenshot “Fair Use.”)

A pro-level Python coder could have banged this script out in minutes. But I’m only a hobbyist. Without generative coding tools, it would have taken me an hour or more before I had the script running, reliable, and rock-stable. So much work! I doubt I would ever have bothered.

But with a generative coding tool, I was able to create this script on a whim, applying next to zero effort. I gave Gemini a second prompt, and it dutifully gave me a script that downloaded a whole month of Flash Gordon in one swoop.

It all went by so fast that I didn't stop to ask myself if there was any kind of an ethical problem with using this script. I've thought about it since, and no, I think I'm fine with this. I might not be entitled to monthly digests of this strip. But I'm paying for everything that King Features is letting me pay for, and I'm just generating something for myself that isn't being offered for sale.

The thing that stuck with me was the fact that I didn't stop to think about that stuff before I went and did it. And this is just one example of arguably-sketchy things that a coding bot can do for you that are definitely beyond your personal skill set.

Ethical thinking thrives with time, silence, and thought

I believe that 99.99% of humanity always tries to do the right thing. But we’re complicated organisms, living in a complicated world.

In many ways, these opportunities for Casual Malfeasance are the hardest kinds of ethical problems to resolve. The defining characteristic of Casual Malfeasance is that whether you do the “right” thing or not…really, nobody’s going to care. Not even if they find out what you did, which they probably won’t. This is entirely up to you.

If you found $27 in folded money in a seat at a public library, you might keep it, or you might turn it in. Keeping it would be unethical, or maybe it wouldn’t be. Whatever you chose to do, you would have invested a certain amount of time navigating a surprisingly complicated matrix. You would only have made your decision after some thought.

(And, after a quick moment of looking around to see if anybody actually saw you pick the money up off the chair. Like I said: it’s a complicated matrix.)

However, AI tools enable us to act on impulse. We’re mammals. “What do I want, right now?” is burned into our bootloaders. But asking ourselves “What’s the right thing to do?” is thoughtful, homo-sapiens-level stuff. Applying our principles to these specific circumstances requires a certain investment of time.

The easy, “you can have it a moment after you think it” power of generative AI removes the “hold on and think about this” part of the process. In effect, AI enables us to gulp down our ethical questions, instead of stopping and savoring them.

People worry that technology will coerce us into doing things that we consider to be unethical. I think the bigger risk is that we'll get so used to receiving immediate rewards that the part of our brains that processes ethical questions will get weaker. "Thou shalt not kill" will still come through loud and clear. But quieter stuff like "Isn't it wrong to use ChatGPT to break through a website paywall?" will no longer be within our range of hearing and we won't even notice that it happened.

If this idea seems silly, take a moment right now and imagine yourself in an unfamiliar city, navigating the streets with a dead phone in your pocket but with an excellent printed map in your hands.

Yeah. Exactly.