Dear AI Companies: Stop the “Doom Trolling” | AI Reality Check

The last three years have been sort of exhausting for me. You know, as a computer scientist and a technology commentator, I was excited by ChatCPT when it was first released. I mean, the effectiveness of generative AI at both understanding and producing structured language was cool and unexpected. It was sort of like when you first saw that that pinch to zoom feature on an early iPhone. So it seems self evident to me that, hey, with enough experimentation, we would for sure find some impressive applications for large language models, and I was curious to learn what they would be. But then, almost immediately, the discourse surrounding AI became cloaked in a mantle of dread and hype. A few months after chat g b t's launch, for example, Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, and Azaraskan published an alarming New York Times op ed about what the arrival of this tool foretold. Here's what they wrote. AI's new mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization. By gaining mastery of language, AI is seizing the master key to civilization from bank vaults to holy, sepulchres. Later in the article, those authors predicted by 2028, the US presidential race might no longer be run by humans. And then perhaps most notably in their conclusion, the authors declared, we have summoned an alien intelligence. Now, though, at the time, I remember that that seemed out of proportion with how large language models actually worked. So a few weeks later, I responded with a a long New Yorker piece that I wrote that was titled, what kind of mind does chat GPT have? And and this led to some media calming, some fear calming media interviews. I got to spend some time up on the hill explaining autoregression to some senators. But, ultimately, it was too little too late because soon after this sort of initial pop of of dread and fear around AI, the AI companies themselves embrace the strategy of trying to unnerve and scare their own customers. A month after my New Yorker article, for example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman signed an open letter that argued, and I'm quoting here, the risk of extinction from AI is on scale with nuclear war. Anthropics' Dario Amede got more specific, claiming on multiple occasions that there was a 25% chance that our AR future would go, quote, really, really badly. He was referring there to the end of the human race. The near future wouldn't be any picnic either. Amede argued on multiple other occasions that 50% of entry level white collar jobs will be automated in the next one to five years. Sam Altman agreed with his general sentiment and helped fund it out of his own pockets experiments in universal basic income because as he explained multiple times, he was convinced that some sort of guaranteed income from the government was the only way that we would avoid having to eat our pets …