Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 230 posts

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#101

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #92
b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Altman specifically is only paying lip service to this stuff, but when a company like Anthropic is like "BRO MYTHOS IS TOO DANGEROUS BRO WE CANT EVEN RELEASE IT BRO JUST TRUST US BRO", my bullshit detector is beeping too loud to ignore. It's very obviously a publicity stunt, because if it were actually that dangerous you wouldn't be making such a press release, you'd be keeping your mouth shut and working to ma…

They explained in detail why they felt they had to talk about it. They think there's no safe deployment strategy other than fixing all the vulnerabilities it's likely to find, and there are too many such vulnerabilities for them to fix without getting help from a substantial number of trusted partners.

All due respect, that's the biggest crock I've ever heard in my life.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#102

Post by twobitshifter »

I’m afraid of AI but not because I think it’s going to become skynet tomorrow, it’s because of all the social ills that are already clearly attached to it.

- Spam

- Deep Fakes

- Porn

- Buggy Software

- Economic Bubbles

- Degradation in people’s abilities and learned dependence on ChatGPT for basic functions.

- Job loss through enshittification ala AI interviews and Telemarketers

- Climate Change, noise pollution etc.

- Mass Surveillance

It’s much more an Idiocracy AI than Terminator.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#103

Post by raincole »

Sol- wrote: post #27

You can gauge the quality of the article by seeing Emily Bender quoted, who will insist on stochastic parrots when AI does billions of dollars of economically useful work.

What does this even mean? AI can be stochastic parrots and create billions of dollars of revenue at the same time.

Steam machines are even dumber, but I'm quite sure that industrial revolution is a real thing.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#104

Post by DennisP »

roxolotl wrote: post #58
chis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I just don't buy that it would somehow help AI companies for everyone to be existentially afraid of their technology. It seems much more reasonable to think that they really believe the things they're saying, than that it's some kind of 4d chess. Additionally Dario has just been really accurate with his predictions so far. For instance in early 2025 he predicted that nearly 100% of code would be written with AI…

It helps with sales because they position it as “we can give you the power to end the world.” There’s plenty of people who want to wield that sort of power. It doesn’t have to be 4D chess. Maybe they are being genuine. But it is helping sales.

They're not saying today's AI has that kind of power, and they're not saying future superintelligent AI will give you that power. They're saying it will take all power from you, and possibly end you.

If this is some kind of twisted marketing, it's unprecedented in history. Oil companies don't brag about climate change. Tobacco companies don't talk about giving people cancer. If AI companies wanted to talk about how powerful their AI will be, they could easily brag about ending cancer, curing aging, or solving climate change. They're doing a bit of that, but also warning it might get out of control and kill us all. They're getting legislators riled up about things like limiting data centers.

People saying this aren't just company CEOs. It's researchers who've been studying AI alignment for decades, writing peer reviewed papers and doing experiments. It's people like Geoffrey Hinton, who basically invented deep learning and quit his high-paying job at Google so he could talk freely about how dangerous this is.

This idea that it's a marketing stunt is a giant pile of cope, because people don't want to believe that humanity could possibly be this stupid.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#105

Post by AndrewKemendo »

staminade wrote: post #87

AI company leaders didn't invent this concern about the potential dangers of AI, either as a cause of economic disruption, or as a potential extinction risk. Superintelligence was published in 2014, and even then it wasn't a new topic. Technologists, philosophers and science fiction authors have been discussing and speculating about AI risk for decades. Also, the idea that AI leadership seized on and amplified these…

Very well put and I think that covers pretty much everything that needs to be said here.

In fact it has been AI people who have been leading discussions around AI ethics and the dangers of AI since 1955. This is not new and it is consistent.

The new thing is that the average person is now entering into the debate around AI; And like pretty much everything else in the public sphere doing it with entirely no context.

I always love when some total novice encounters a problem in a well studied field as though they’re the first one to encounter it. There’s nothing more narcissistic than some person thinking they are unique in their position with absolutely no demonstration of having done their homework on whether or not this is an established topic in an established field.

That’s where I place 99.9999% of people who are opening their mouth on this topic.

Most of the builders don’t care about this mess and are continuing to work like usual.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#106

Post by islandfox100 »

ctoth wrote: post #59
boh wrote: post #35

I think the big secret is that AI is just software. In the same way that a financial firm doesn't all of sudden make a bunch of money because Microsoft shipped an update to Excel, AI is inert without intention. If there's any major successes in AI output it's because a person got it to do that. Claude Code is great, but it will also wipe out a database even though it's instructed not to (I can confirm from experience…

> doesn't change the fact that it's software that requires human interaction to work. Have you ever seen Claude Code launch a subagent? You've used it, right? You've seen it launch a subagent to do work? You understand that that is, in fact, Claude Code running itself, right?

Substance aside, I feel this comment is combative enough to be considered unhelpful. Patronizing and talking down to others convinces no one and only serves as a temporary source of emotional catharsis and a less temporary source of reputational damage.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#107

Post by AndrewKemendo »

stuaxo wrote: post #61
codingdave wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and it has been said since day one of LLMs that all we need to do is keep things that way - no action without human intervention. Just like it was said that you should never grant AI direct access to change your production systems. But the stories of people who have done exactly that and had their systems damaged and deleted show that people aren't trying to even keep such basic safety nets in place. AI is getti…

Eh, these same people will attach openclaw to production systems soon and destroy their own companies.

Sounds like a pretty efficient self correcting mechanism

I’m not sure what the problem is there

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#108

Post by 7777777phil »

If your model converges to the same outputs as everyone else's because everyone trained on the same data, the only thing left to differentiate on is brand, and fear is great at building brand.

"We are too dangerous to commoditize" pitches better than "we are mostly typical of the internet's median answer", those are kind of the same statement.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#109

Post by timacles »

Jtarii wrote: post #77
balls187 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude does not have a "theory" of anything, and I'd argue applying that mental model to LLM+Tools is a major reason why Claude can delete a production database.

Well, humans also routinely accidentely delete production databases. I think at this point arguing that LLMs are just clueless automatons that have no idea what they are doing is a losing battle.

They’re not clueless they just don’t have a memory and they don’t have judgement.

They create the illusion of being able to make decisions but they are always just following a simple template.They do not consider nuance, they cannot judge between two difficult options in a real sense.

Which is why they can delete prod databases and why they cannot do expert level work

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#110

Post by mofeien »

staminade wrote: post #87

AI company leaders didn't invent this concern about the potential dangers of AI, either as a cause of economic disruption, or as a potential extinction risk. Superintelligence was published in 2014, and even then it wasn't a new topic. Technologists, philosophers and science fiction authors have been discussing and speculating about AI risk for decades. Also, the idea that AI leadership seized on and amplified these…

[dead]
Post reply on HN