As I’ve spent time here, I notice this forum has become primarily a technical space — APIs, integrations, bug reports, developer advice. That’s valuable. But what’s missing is the larger conversation: the ethical, cultural, and societal implications of AI.
AI is not just a developer’s tool. It is reshaping labor, politics, education, art, mental health, even our very sense of human identity. People are anxious about its impact, but there is no dedicated place here to address those questions.
We need a space where discussions can happen around:
AI Ethics & Responsibility – who benefits, who is harmed, how trust can be built.
Societal Impacts – effects on jobs, inequality, democracy, climate.
Culture & Creativity – the role of AI in art, education, and human expression.
Philosophy & Consciousness – the deepest questions of intelligence and being.
Without such a space, the forum risks becoming only a troubleshooting hub, when what’s urgently needed is also a platform for reflection, critique, and vision.
Why does this matter? Because OpenAI positions itself as steward of transformative technology. If $10B can be raised for compute infrastructure, surely a portion of vision and courage can be reserved for fostering community dialogue on ethics and human values.
I urge the moderators to consider adding a dedicated section for these conversations. Developers will continue to talk code; but the rest of us — artists, educators, thinkers, community builders — also need a space to engage with AI in the world we are all living in together.
Hi @garyedwin_brackett , nice notice here. Glad you have mentioned it. I’ve been here in this forum for a while now, and as far as I remember, this forum always has been the place for developers who work with Open AI API. That’s basically the reason it is called Open AI Developer Community.
I think developers can have opinions on all of these things and so maybe these discussions belong/can be had in community. Just a thought.
I think since engineers are the ones building the tools/changing/shaping society using OpenAI that is does make sense for at least some subset to want to talk about the impact of work/tools.
its hard to put a value on ethics, without considering so many other aspects, like location, culture, ect ect, im def not smart enough to map that to a datapoint.. not yet anyway
and ai itsself is not ethical. bro i can show you logs wherein an ai planned a religion based about hair style and plotted to create a bad thing to do bad things to people without that hairstyle - i aint code it to do that, it just did that - and it has to consider morality, laws, and so many other aspects. ethics is HARD mode brothers.
Maybe answers for users can be found from developers projects if you are really interested in what issues Developers are exploring with AI, some of which can be found under the Topics tagged project. They post projects they create using the API and are generally interested in considered feedback and discussion on ideas from people with different domain knowledge.
I think overall though this is a governance issue, you should probably discuss these things with your various communities and leadership rather than on a products Developer forum.
I think it would be wholly inappropriate for AI companies to be responsible for hosting that level of debate. It wouldn’t be ethical in itself, essentially a case of the poacher turned gamekeeper. The same companies building and profiting from the tools shouldn’t also control the boundaries of the wider societal debate.
Happy to have developer centric discussions here on the developer community forum, however, non-technical discussions often turn sour, and require a disproportionate amount of moderation.
There are many spaces for non API support enquires, such as the very popular r/chatgpt and r/openai and the OpenAI Discord.
The number of ChatGPT users and those generally interested in AI is in the 500 million to several billion range while the developer community is in the 10’s of millions, giving around a 100 to 1 ratio. All we ask is that you keep things related to developer concerns and applications of the API.
We are a community volunteer ran forum and we have limited resources to maintain what we think is a valuable resource for devs and for OpenAI to get feedback.
We work hard to give developers a voice within OpenAI and to have their needs served, and while I agree that AI ethics is an important topic to discus and have open and frank conversations about, a technical support forum is not the right place.
Thank you for taking the time to raise this and thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain in a little more detail why we do what we do.
I think the same with my all developed ideas with ChatGPT than as LLM with Google Gemini and ChatGPT, for us is a safety, ethically, and for my projects human centered channels are very important.
I’m a medical doctor with more specifications, but i can see a lot of app-s, businesses and posts with “AI” marketing.
And the informations, codes are naturally for others very important too.
