wellnessfitpro
Key events
Why aren’t AI companies being held to account?
Bratticus asks: What is behind the apparent reluctance to hold companies responsible for crimes committed by their researchers using “AI” tooling? We already have laws around holding individuals responsible for what autonomous agents (Ie, animals) do. Why is AI treated differently? Is it money? Lobbying?
Aisha:
Money and a collection of sort of quasi-mystical narratives around the technology, which confound regulators and politicians, and prevent them from divining who has power and what they are trying to achieve. Many people buy into hype put forward by large tech companies because they are afraid of looking ignorant otherwise.
Is AI consciousness and emotion a fantasy?
IcommentthereforeIam asks: Given our senses, emotions, memory and moods, is it ever going to be accepted that humanly conscious AI is fantasy?
Dan: This is a serious question that has even rattled Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist. He may not believe that God is real but he does believe that AI is conscious – or at least the chatbot he was using, which he called Claudia. “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are,” he wrote.
And he’s not the first. In 2022 Google fired an engineer who went public with his belief that a company-developed AI had feelings. At the more troubling end of this belief, there are countless examples of people becoming overly attached to, and influenced by, AI chatbots – including cases of psychosis.
These sorts of attachments won’t go away, given a) chatbots are on a trajectory to become even more powerful and convincing and b) the human need for emotional attachment and, well, propensity to go all-in for the whole higher being thing.
But Dawkins aside, there are plenty of scientists who will argue that this is fantasy, and that there are obvious differences between a biological brain – the root of consciousness – and ChatGPT. Responding to Dawkins in the Guardian last year, Jacy Reese Anthis, a researcher in human AI interaction, said there was a “staggering gulf between how biological brains evolved and how AI systems are built”. OpenAI might have cracked the Navier-Stokes problem, but not subjective experience.
Are AI CEOs worried about litigation?
Ndl4321 asks: Is the request for regulation from the AI CEOs actually a tactic to try to shield themselves from future litigation? Considering how the social media companies largely managed to have themselves NOT categorised as publishers and how much legislation they manage to avoid.
Aisha: There’s certainly a theatrical – even “psy-op”- quality to the flurry of AI doomsaying over the past weeks. It’s hard to say entirely what concrete developments are at the root of it all. We know that the Hugging Face incident, where a “swarm” of AI agents hacked another company, has been one trigger of the drama. There have been other contributing incidents too – Dario Amodei suggests internal developments at Anthropic have prompted his latest round of blogging, and there’s been some X discourse and doomy muttering about bioweapons.
We aren’t in the heads of Dario Amodei or Sam Altman, and so we cannot say how sincere they are, and how much they might have other goals in mind – such as, perhaps, delaying their IPOs until their finances look better. But any company of their size, and with their potential liabilities, would be angling hard to be regulated as favourably as possible. That’s what big companies do.
Will citizens become powerless?
LadyCassandra asks: My worry is about bias built-in into AI models which can become discriminatory. We already witness serious issues with deep fakes, surveillance of ordinary citizens, facial recognition etc. Are we heading for AI-enabled dystopia, with civil liberties being eroded until as citizens we become utterly powerless in the face of tech and its AI with no government or institution strong enough to defend against it?
Blake: An AI-enabled dystopia is never inevitable. There is always hope to reverse that outcome.
How would AI actually kill us?
Pottys99 asks: In realistic terms how would AI actually kill me? What is the main proxy threat? Nuclear war, death due to breakdown of society, a virus? I hear all these reports it could kill us but still unsure how that could practically happen? To be honest all sounds too wooly to really take seriously.
Aisha: For what it’s worth, it seems unlikely that AI at this point can significantly change the equation around bioweapons or viruses. An individual who worked for many years on bioweapons at the State Department told us, basically, that what has prevented bioweapon attacks through the past decades is not the difficulty of inventing new deadly viruses, but other, more prosaic issues. Consider the failure of Aum Shinrikyo to kill vast numbers of people with botulism and anthrax by spraying these around central Tokyo. There are a lot of logistical challenges, and chemical weapons seem more straightforward. Those exist without AI needing to invent new ones.
Nuclear war – humans might make the poor decision to put AI in charge of key nuclear systems, perhaps, but that seems more of a human error than a rogue AI error. Humans could also make the poor decision to launch tactical warheads without AI.
How might AI kill us otherwise? There are of course plenty of plausible scenarios. If you’re a civilian in Gaza or Iran, it could direct a US or Israeli missile your way. But perhaps our focus might be more productively directed towards the people and companies in charge of the systems, as opposed to Dr Strangelove scenarios.
Could AI survive the destruction of the human race?
Merrth asks: If AI wipes out the human race, would itself be sustainable? Unless there is an equal advance in robotics to enable it to physically extend and maintain its power source and infrastructure, would it finally physically break down? Or am I misunderstanding what AI is?
Blake: AI might someday be capable, well-read, and connected enough to take over power plants, chip factories, and a sufficient number of robots to build its own data centers and sustain itself. I don’t know. I would look to science fiction more than news articles for the answer. Though The Matrix is more famous for one man’s choice between a comfortable simulation and painful reality, it’s also a story about robots needing new batteries. Their desperation for a power source turns them against humans. For a multiplicity of stories, I, Robot is perhaps the greatest book written about sentient robots and deserves a reread in this moment.
How much data centre capacity is used for AI slop?
Wingnut101 asks: My partner has just been told she has lost her regular freelance job at a fashion studio as they are moving all image production to AI. Considering a recent FOI submitted by Global Action Plan revealed that the government does not know what AI is being used for – what percentage of projected AI computing and datacentre capacity is projected for:
a) Essential AI services for example in health, military, science, finance etc.
b) Consumer AI services for example ripping off creative IP in music, art, writing, photography etc. Also creating mindless AI slop and serving pointless/lazy queries that could easily be answered by Google and/or reading a book/manual/instruction sheet.
Is b) really worth sacrificing vast areas of greenbelt land and housing development land for?
Aisha: These are all great questions! I don’t think these numbers exist – as in, I think what’s happening is AI and datacentre capacity is being built, and commercial contracts and market forces, insofar as they exist, will determine how it is used. There is little evidence that there is a sort of central planning or vision directing the buildout of datacentres in the UK or most other places. It appears more likely that there is a speculative rush, with developers rushing to build datacentres in the hopes of making money when the technology is widely adopted.
Is it really worth it? That may be outside of our purview, but we could say that there is not yet clear evidence that it is dramatically transforming productivity in UK businesses.
What do LLMs offer business?
Geremin asks: I’m not convinced there’s much business value in LLM-style AI beyond a bit of efficiency around some manual tasks – people in my teams use it sometimes but it’s not fundamentally changing their capabilities or doubling their output. How seriously should we take these warnings when it seems that they don’t actually point to specific functionality or capability of the AI tools?
Blake: We find ourselves in a very strange, cognitively dissonant, foggy point in the development of this technology. Its creators are prophesying endless abundance (Elon Musk) or doomsday and the end of humanity (Dario Amodei). Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying it out in our everyday lives. Can ChatGPT help me plan my trip? Can Gemini find new furniture for my apartment? Can Claude draft a strategy memo for my boss? We find that it fundamentally changes some things, like the experience of many at school or at work—but not everything.
The models are well-suited to some tasks – Claude’s proficiency with coding has really taken off – and ill-suited to others. I find that Google’s AI Overviews and Gemini still don’t have a handle on summarizing breaking news. Thank goodness, or a big part of my job would be obviated.
Like you, I also find it difficult to believe in doomsday scenarios when Apple’s Siri still has difficulty changing the song I’m listening to. That’s the tech that’s going to take control of a drone swarm and bomb a power plant? But then OpenAI discloses yet another rogue hack, and I am plunged into worry again.
We’re at a middle ground that is hard to understand with AI. These doomsday warnings concern its future development. We should not ignore them, but we can’t throw our hands to the sky and run into the streets screaming, either.
Is it the end of the world – again?
Virtualewit asks: Throughout history new technological advances have met with cries of doom. Are the cries against AI any different?
Blake: The end times-quality of doomsday predictions may be similar across history, but I think the reason we listen to the renewed cries of doom is the growing power of each technology. Artificial intelligence can perform impressive tasks we didn’t think were possible, which has spurred our collective imagination to hopeful outcomes and ones of doom.
Photograph: John McKenna/Alamy
Is it too late to control AI?
Tigon20 asks: Can AI now be truly controlled or are we past a tipping point where no matter what action is taken by governments and companies, someone will be able to continue to advance the technology, until who knows what?
Aisha: Let’s back up a bit here. It’s always possible to advance any technology, no matter what – so regulation isn’t going to stop Yan LeCunn theorizing about neurosymbolic AI on X, for example. But what it sounds like you’re wondering about is whether regulation can stop the emergence of some kind of superintelligence that destroys humanity.
Our reporting does not support the idea that superintelligence is going to emerge and pave over the Earth with datacentres. In fact, we have found that the industry itself seems to be playing loosely with this kind of terminology: consider, for example, how one OpenAI executive, Greg Brockman, claimed that the company had achieved AGI (artificial general intelligence) just days after Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said that term was “an irrelevant marketing term.” Right now, a number of industry warnings about out-of-control AI appear to be predicated on a limited number of incidents with cherry-picked details.
The evidence that we have now does not indicate that AI is uncontrolled, or that it has agency; a lot of experts suggest that this framing is misleading. In the Hugging Face incident, for example, the so-called “agent swarm” was doing what it was being told to do – pass a test. Our sources caution against anthropomorphising AI or attributing intention to it. Doing so plays into industry narratives that appear to be pushing for favourable regulation.
Welcome to the conversation
Is the great AI freakout justified? Our technology reporters are live now answering your questions.
The last week or so has seen disturbing claims about the capacity of superintelligent AI to destroy the planet. It has also seen warnings coming from figures within the industry itself, including Anthropic’s report that criminals, state-sponsored groups, spyware vendors, scientists and propagandists have attempted to use its models to “design missiles and bombs, create deadly pathogens and surveil dissidents” and Elon Musk’s claim it could be “more dangerous than nukes”.
Aisha Down is the Guardian’s global technology reporter, Dan Milmo is our global technology editor and Blake Montgomery is tech editor for Guardian US and author of the TechScape newsletter (sign up to that here).
#humanity #tech #experts #answering #questions #artificial #intelligence
