AI Optimism vs. AI Pessimism

Today on the AI Daily Brief, AI optimism versus AI pessimism. AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright, friends. Quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Airtable, Blitsy, and Retool. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And to learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai. Today, we are checking in on the state of the discourse around AI risk. And more broadly, thinking about AI optimism versus AI pessimism. Now in that context, if I told you that someone had produced a commercial about AI where the first few images are smash cuts of a burning building, a set of gravestones, and mass surveillance, plus a bunch of people being stressed out because they lost their jobs and some homeless people, you might guess that that was a political ad by some anti AI group. Right? But in fact, it is not. Instead, it's the first set of images from a new ad from Anthropic. Now the theme of the campaign is the idea of there being hope in hard questions. That's their phrase. And so what the ad actually is is a set of very hard questions about AI taking our jobs and whether or not AI can be trusted, that's where that visceral negative imagery comes in at the beginning, moving to a set of more optimistic or positive questions, like could AI help me build more connections in the community, and could AI help more people feel understood? Now on the one hand, I will say that I understand what the goal of this content asset is. It's to try to meet people where Anthropic imagines they are and acknowledge the hard stuff before pushing on into the good stuff. And yet in practice, I think it is spectacularly tone deaf and completely fails to acknowledge the way that people actually receive media. It is a perpetuation of this long term fetish that AI companies have had with quote, unquote acknowledging all the bad sides and the risks rather than just selling the positive vision. And blame it on the tension spans or anything else. I think most people who see this aren't gonna make it past the first few seconds where it's all burning buildings and gravestones. Now I wanna be clear. Others were in disbelief as well. Sam Altman, who yesterday seemed to wake up and choose violence on Twitter, retweeted the ad and said, I thought this was satire. And I thought this was an interesting jumping off point for a larger conversation about how some of the AI societal concern discourse is evolving. Because over the last week or so, we've actually gotten a couple different examples that show what I think is a more positive direction in the practicality of that discourse. The first …