Offbeat

AI Doomerism Is Just Marketing

Last week, a group of former OpenAI employees came forward with a very scary warning that AI companies have been acting secretly and irresponsibly and need to be regulated. Was this group of insiders ringing the alarm bell on rampant copyright infringement? No. What about the fact that racial biases are being encoded into these models? Nope. Misinformation and destruction of journalism? Don’t be stupid.

Rather than anything that currently matters or even exists, this group is actually very worried about “the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction,” as they wrote on their website. It makes for good headlines and is enough to earn them the token New York Times arms-crossed whistleblower photo, but let’s be real. This is just marketing. That doesn’t mean I don’t think these people believe what they’re saying. They definitely seem to. And that’s the problem.