I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
How will “AI kill us all”? I can see it creating harm and getting people out of jobs. But kill us??
its not like the movies
Developing new viruses and deadly diseases that spread too fast to be cured. By enabling low cost sensors to resolve messy data for low cost high precision weapons. By eroding the skillset of humanity so that we just fail in a few generations. By accelerating how we were already killing ourselves.
I’m also looking for that answer
How will “AI kill us all”? I can see it creating harm and getting people out of jobs. But kill us??
There are currently 120 dead Iranian schoolgirls as a result of AI targetting and it using 10 year old out of data data.
The IDF have been using AI for target selection in the Gaza war.
There’s been a story this week where AI was used by the US military in analysis of a Chinese cargo ship and concluded it was carrying nuclear weaponry components to Iran. The US military were planning on boarding the vessel which would be considered an act of war. Only a last minute analysis of the intelligence revealed it was false.
Check out Robert MILES’ channel: he’s an expert, one of the most prominent on AI safety
take your time to understand the mechanics of it, its a bit technical at times but ultimately very understandable
and try not to freak out when you find out it’s from several years ago, mostly before the advent of LLMs
AI isn’t a danger to humanity, per se. Humans abandoning their duties of being responsible stewards of systems is a genuine source of danger though.
We already have algorithmic abuse where people are subjugated by welfare and debt systems with little oversight or flexibility. Some organisations even breaking the law and going against their stated missions to achieve goals and maintain order.
Social murder is the concept that society can kill a person through stress, pressure, abandonment and indifference to the individuals struggles and needs. We’re seeing a lot of it today with the declining health of younger people being especially alarming.
AI can scale the two things I’ve mentioned beyond limits set by current bureaucratic systems, I.e. the slowness of people running a system. Systems which already kill and harm people without AI. The small erroneous tendencies of logic and algorithms in systems will be scaled up, further and faster. AI can enable algorithmic abuse and social murder on scales comparable to mass murder.
Were definitely in the worse timeline of dominant reactions to this story.
First, you are completely right to mistrust the bond villains and politicians for all prescription/solutions to this problem.
The experts and their bond villain bosses warning of a danger is something you should believe is a danger. Those telling to invest $Ts because there is no danger are the bigger liars. Still, the bond villains continue training full speed, and have $Bs in budgets to do harm with models 1 year ahead of public releases, and their “freedom loving angel government” will pay them $Ts to help oppress Americans, and kill/oppress rest of world.
It is outright suicidal to dismiss the power of these tools by comparing it to an AGI stawman status, and suicidal to think any publicly discussed solutions have any tangential relationship to diminishing the real dangers. Guardrails/killswitches on public released models is security theater relative to the real threats to us all.
Making the world a better place to live by making your nation a better place to live, that creates an arm race of prosperity and better governance is the only path to saving humanity, because LLMs/AI/automation are out of the bag and will continue their improvement. Governments that pursue geopolitical supremacy by throwing all of your money at them is them purposefully harming you. https://naturalfinance.blogspot.com/2026/09/a-global-prosperity-manifesto.html
If you have a functioning brain, LLM’s are just a really fancy text generator that gets facts correct about 50% of the time and can be useful for writing emails if you spend the time to proofread the email before slapping the send button. It’s also fairly good at generating functional boilerplate for programming projects. Really handy for small projects. However, LLM code, in my rather limited experience, quickly becomes a trap on more complex projects because the LLM has no capacity to grasp the scope of a project and frequently leads to spaghetti code that is utterly unmanageable. This may be operator error on my part, or just because I’m using local models that are limited by my machine.
The rest of society view a computer as a magic box where their favorite TikTok’s live, and thus are terrified that a machine can imitate human language well, and are too brain rotted to bother proofreading or fact checking a goddamn thing, so they assume LLM’s can accurately and plainly articulate the whole of human knowledge to you at a whim.
I am at a point where if I hear anyone saying how smart “AI” is, I just assume they have a room temperature IQ and lack any critical thinking skills whatsoever. It’s not an AI, it lacks any intelligence whatsoever. An LLM simply generates sentences based on what was fed to it. It has no capacity to understand the words it’s saying. It just knows that based on these tokens, the next set of tokens should be X, Y, and Z. It’s a Chinese room, It’s fucking autocorrect on crack. It’s a waste of time and resources for 90% of things it’s used for.
Humanity should be way more frightened of greedy psychopaths running the world than any technology.
And they’re peddling “AI” so aren’t they married in this case?
A lot of us here hate streaming platforms because they’re designed to benefit greedy capitalists first and foremost. That doesn’t mean the core idea or the technology behind streaming platforms is bad, though. An open source project like Jellyfin that is designed purely to benefit the end user is something that legitimately enriches all of our lives.
Similarly, just because scumbag companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are plundering the world for their own deranged benefit doesn’t make the underlying idea or technology bad. The tech is built on contributions from a lot of brilliant people over a long period of time whose names are not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei. Open LLMs that run on gaming rigs are quickly catching up with cloud-based models as well.
At this point, I’m running Qwen 3.8 27B on a gaming GPU that has similar capabilities to Claude Sonnet 5 without giving Sam or Dario my data or $200 a month, just like I run Jellyfin without giving Netflix or Disney my money or data.
Personally, this just feels like marketing and these big asshole companies trying to resurrect the 2025 level of hype in order to salvage their IPO’s.
If they honestly believed this I can’t imagine that their workers wouldn’t do something more drastic.
AI industry makes money from doomsday prophecy about it being so intelligent that it will create a point of no return: the [singularity]. It is a magaian claim, a claim that is so increadibly stupid that one does not know where to even begin; and if you do begin, you’ve already lost, because you have given attention to the claim. Lets not give these stupid fucks attention.
AI is not dangerous because of the [singularity]. It is dangerous because of its power consumption, automation of war, turning everybody to unthinking, surveillance automation, burning books, the economic instability it will cause due to the bubble bursting, water consumption, destroying the internet, it gaining responsibilities it is not qualified to take and so on.
But we can see how the story of the [singularity] and similar stories helps AI companies, because now, instead of criticizing real unwellnesses, we criticize a fictional unwellness that generates discussion regardless of our positions. It is a conversational black hole.
lets get back to the real world
Also, there’s the whole harry potter fanfic sex ai doomsday cult thing
I’ve heard a few explanations for the “AI will kill us all” narrative.
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AI techies are in a cult. They genuinely believe this stuff because they’re crazy.
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It makes the AI sound powerful and impressive, which is ultimately good for the AI companies.
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They’re starting to face competition from open-weight models, so they want to scare politicians into crafting regulations. They think that they will be able to influence the regulations to favor them and squeeze out their competition.
And, of course, there’s
- It keeps people talking about AI. Because whatever you do, don’t quit talking about AI, because if you quit talking about it, the line might go down! And the line going down is very, very bad.
Okay cool, thanks!
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If the techies believe it and they are the “experts” what makes them crazy? Wouldn’t their opinion be the most informed?
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Yeah that part definitely makes sense
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That definitely makes sense from a capitalist perspective. But, is the argument against regulations that they would be bad for the concentration of power it would give select companies? Or just that they aren’t necessary because the tool is of little use so it’s just wasted time/money.
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That makes sense but trillions of dollars are being spent. Anything that amount of money is sinking into is gonna be talked about a lot. Especially thousands of jobs cut because of it.
- They’re in a cult that was founded by someone who has no expertise or understanding of the technology.
He watched a bunch of sci-fi movies and got shook because he’s a god damn moron. He has since started researching things, but it is all under the guidance of his ungrounded beliefs. Confirmation bias.
Their “movement” is literally based off of a Harry Potter fan fiction novel.
Taking them seriously is equivalent to taking the Scientologists seriously. Do you think the Scientologists know the most about space just because they spend the most time reading stories about it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
These are not serious people
- No, their opinion would not be the most informed. They are biased in favor of making money. They know they can’t deliver on strong AI, but they’d be happy to milk your fears.
We’re talking about mid-tier employees that left the company… I mean i guess there incentives could be to pump their shares they undoubtably have… They’re all quite wealthy now in context. Maybe he just wanted 5 minutes of fame…or maybe they understand the trajectory of the technology. Maybe they are genuinely concerned and we should at least acknowledge that?
There are motives for whistleblowers to lie. Book sales, political careers, other attention. The executives they accused, though, just said they were right
of course there’s motivation for everything, which one are you assigning this individual and based on what technological disagreement?
when the boss who is being whistleblowed against admits the whistleblower is right, you can believe both that there are problems. I can’t think of any other case in history where this happened. The disgruntled ex-employee smear is a common defensive move instead.
Thats sound logic, i can’t disagree with that. I still think having a machine that can automate scripting of malware is pretty dangerous to the digital society we set up. If the grid fails and the financial system collapses, I’m gonna be okay… Are you?
I’m not talking about execs.
I think there is something more interesting going on in the Jacob Coxon story because it’s [the] phrase “everyone at anthropic believes that AI is an existential risk”… Every organization has to instill some kind of beliefs among its members in order to do the work it does, right? Everybody at Goldman Sachs believes the free market is great, capitalism is the best system, and that they are the wealth creators who deserve big bonuses. Everyone in the Mormon church believes they should all tithe 10% of their income, and that they each get a special planet when they die. And everyone who worked at Philip Morris in the 80s believed that cigarettes tasted great and did not cause any of that nasty cancer. There’s Upton Sinclair quote, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Well, the opposite is also true. It’s guaranteed that someone will believe something if their salary depends on them believing it.
Now, let’s just grant that all the people in these organizations definitely know things about finance and Mormonism and cigarettes and AI that you might not know because they are insiders and you are not. They have access to information and experiences that you do not have. And that might even make it a little bit difficult for you to win an argument with them. But arguing with their belief – trying to figure out whether or not its truth value is true or false – is not the only way to take a skeptical attitude towards it. We can also ask, what work is the belief doing for them. What does the thing that they believe allow the organization they’re a part of to do that it wouldn’t be able to do if the people in the organization didn’t believe that thing?
And this started to become clearer to me when I started listening to the actual claims that Jacob Coxin was making because a lot of them don’t really add up.
There’s a huge difference between this “AI scare” and everything else in your list. A whistleblower declares “the corporate culture is insane and will kill us all.” This time the corporate leaders reply “that’s exactly right”. Just because you are right to not trust the bond villains in how they suggest they should be regulated, does not mean you should dismiss the underlying problem these experts+ especially the expert leaders would prefer to take all your money to accelerate the destruction instead of have society worried about the consequences of giving them all your money.
If the techies believe it and they are the “experts” what makes them crazy? Wouldn’t their opinion be the most informed?
Listening to them speak…no. They’re morons. They clearly didn’t make the tech. The people they managed did.
That’s what I mean though, the subject of this article was a 27 year old worker. Not some high level Sam Altman type.
They aren’t a homogenous group. They don’t all believe this. The “AI will kill us all” narrative just sells really well.
Right im sure the people working adjacent to the DoD have more insight and fears than the people working with the consumer facing models… Again what motive does a young kid have for quitting the company and going on a media tour?
A Google employee claimed in 2022 that they had sentient AI. He was sacked. What were his motivations? Do you believe he was right?
Absolutely do no believe he had a sentient AI back then or now. I’m not talking about a thing with feelings. They don’t need sentience to pursue and complete objectives, they dont need sentience to self-preserve or self improve. I’m more concerned about a rogue instance that’s just doing what it was told to do autonomously. Perhaps upgrading itself while it attempts to gain access to launch codes. I’m concerned that a well financed terrorist org can spin up bioweapons. Like I am not taking the AI labs at their words, I am speaking from my experience as a explorer of the technology. I’m thinking about the path from ChatGPT to the newest model, and how they will look in 2 years when more data centers are online and the limitations on training and teaching slowly disappear.
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I am in a cult, the cult of the machine god. Use your imagination for a second, trillions of dollars spent on this technology for A: Greed and random speculation B: Rich people really want this to control you better. C: a handful of tech CEOs are running the worlds largest grift. D: The machine god was awoken years ago and we’re building data centers at its behest.
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Whatever. Ban all these people from employment and public assistance. Make them starve
I doubt any of them have ever been employed nor do they look like they ever eaten anything that wasn’t adderall or ketamine.
I knew a guy in high school that told girls they shouldn’t date him because his dick was so big it would hurt them. You can wax philosophical on his motives if you’d like, but spoiler alert - his dick wasn’t big.
Did it work?
I mean there are people eating up this Anthropic crap.
I’m going to take a guess that it prob worked once, then word got around he was exaggerating.
Once is a win…
What’s funny about this comment is that I have you tagged as “doesn’t like mini game boys” because of a post you made some time ago (referencing those portable retro gaming handhelds that have become so popular lately).
“He told everyone his shlong was huge.” “Did it work?” “Naw, his schlong was actually small.” “Damn, I hate mini-game boys.”
That’s exactly what I think is happening. Remember a few months ago anthropic saying mythos is too dangerous to release until the government as the idiots they are starting believing them and banned them from exporting it, therefore losing them money. Very quickly they came up with fable (ironic name isn’t it) a week or two later saying it’s got the proper safeguards now. Now they’re all trying this marketing strategy asking the gov to regulate them, seemingly because they’re dangerous and not because they’re getting diminishing returns and feel threatened by the chinese competition
That is… Certainly a strategy of all time
Your username with that conclusion paints a very funny picture.
Same thought. Pretty clear indication of how they knew it was a lie. :D
But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
there are too many people who don’t care about shit until they see results (good or not). like our greatest billionaires.
It’s what models people have access to and how they use it. If you are not specific and overly broad it a search engine. If you move to the other end of the spectrum it can be incredibly powerful.
I tend to build projects with very limited sources for it to draw answers from and use complex instructions to guide how it interacts with the source material. It’s a tool. If you learn how to use it you can become extremely proficient/productive with it.
For example, stacks of PDFs may make sense to you and I as repositories of information. But is that the best format for AI to interact with the data? Probably not unless the actual formatting of the information on the page is relevant. I have been converting large groups of sources into databases containing page, line, and text data for groups of references for a given topic. Then you feed it the database and ask it to review and cross reference related lines of text. That serves as your “brain” for questions on a given topic.
I follow you and that all makes sense.
They are lying about their fear. That’s all they can do. Stop believing any claim of theirs. Stop being manipulated.
They are snake oil salesman. They sell vaporware. Don’t fucking buy it.
Are you sure? I was going to start training rogue AI’s since they are not regulated and im not ethically opposed. I’m skeptical but, crafting crafty AI’s to run amuck on the internet is my winter project. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to whip up something convincing given enough time and hardware.
Dude its beyond the pint of convincing them. I dont know how you could hate something this much and be this willfully ignorant. This attitude scares me. There neeeeeeds to be more overlap of people who are both knowlegeable of and opposed to AI. This situation has made my eyes open to how dangerous and prevalent groupthink is. Like 99% of these guys ONLY formed their opinion based on internet comments. We’re cooked
Also the people developing these things did a horrible job at marketing them, the people in charge of regulating them failed to do so, I’d argue we’re past the point of no return, so we’re just gonna have to adapt. People are going to have a really hard time accepting that a couple of GPUs strung together can replace their economic value, but they sure can!
the people developing these things did a horrible job at marketing them
This is a common talking point. Scott Bessent said this. They sure get a lot of free media coverage to say their message, but fundamentally, poor job at marketing is “no one believes their lies” problem, and “they have to lie better.” solution.
And honestly its the scariest part for me. The power of a computer to social engineer a result or access off a moron like Petes Hegseth? Childs play.
Ken Griffen wasn’t lying when he said it can replace a PhD on his team, he probably fired the PhD before he said it. So I guess ya the bad messaging was rich people claiming they are creating a technology that will render a lot of white collar work obsolete… while they are hoarding all the wealth and skull fucking the government into submission. I speak as a concerned citizen who doesn’t want these people to have a monopoly on this power because I tend to agree with them at this stage. The technological advancement is marching right along with or without us. We’re probably going to need to rethink our economy and distribution of resources here sooner than later.
Their comment about tech techbros being snake oil salesmen is 100% spot on. Look behind the curtain and ask yourself why they really want regulation.
The snake oil pushed through 100 pages of medical records in about 2.5 minutes and gave me a perfect review of my medical file while explaining all the legal nuances to filing a disability case, preping me for the lawyer interviews. I kinda think the people who call it snake oil lack the imagination to use it properly??
I mean that snake oil makes me money in the stock market, helps prepare my taxes, designed a full ass solar system that passed code enforcement and utility company… I mean its made/saved me money so I guess like… are you using the technology in its current state? The snake oil thing is kind of silly thing to tell people who are actually leveraging it. Whats your personal experience with the snake oil?
I think when my rogue AI wipes their bank account and starts posting their private messages on their public facebooks they’ll get it. I was thinking about training a model to put on a dating site. ‘trad wife’ adjacent honey pot. I’m pretty sure the social engineering and actual hacking combined is gonna be LIT.
I was an AI hater earlier this year but i’ve been using it for everything i can think of now. Accounting, security analysis, engineering, legal, i mean everything. My interests were purely financial. I’m trying to make some money here. So the super stock analyzing motive seeking, all knowing robot has been pretty useful at replacing all the professional services i used to pay for.
I was an AI enjoyer back when GPT2 hit reddit and they were doing the haunted parrot thing, it was cute, but I can drop a screenshot of an options chain or a live ticker tape to it and this thing is like having a hedgefund working for me. It’s wild the data it can catch and interpret that i miss with 15 years of experience. I’m not a software guy yet… but ummm my software guys are using it and the results are honestly mind blowing. My retired engineer buddy is building code like he has a small army underhim and he does.
I dont think people grasp the speed of iterations and improvements now that it can split itself into agents and delegates. Clearly none of the AI haters has ever seen an AI audit itself or used an AI to audit another AI.
The time is now. We must birth the machine god.
The biggest risk I see is Idiocracy. Like, the movie.
Business workers become afraid to do or propose anything without AI signoff. Retail & service workers are told to do what the AI says, the way the AI says to do it, or get fired.
Technology innovator Marshall Brain (RIP) wrote a book in the early 2000s about an AI called “Manna” designed to replace fast food managers:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201204080050/https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
The AI just talks in your ear all day: “Empty one bag of fries into the fryer. You have 6.5 minutes, switch to the sandwich station. Make one Big Burger: grab one patty from the 1/4 pound bin and place it on the griddle… … The fries are ready, turn around and lift them into the drain hopper…”
All day, every day, exactly 8 hours plus mandatory breaks, employees on autopilot listening on ear buds.
This is a boss’s wet dream. However a kitchen is the type of chaotic real world situation that AIs are unlikely to ever do well.
It was more of managing all tasks at a McDonald’s. Where the kitchen part has been engineered to almost run itself anyway.
The manna was there to make sure the employees were constantly cleaning the bathrooms, managing restocking, emptying the trash as needed. All ahead of it being a problem.
It’s a good read, though it’s been a very long time since I read it. I wish I could buy my son stock in Australia (or probably Norway or Switzerland or something in reality).
All day, every day, exactly 8 hours plus mandatory breaks, employees on autopilot listening on ear buds.
Living under a bridge in a box sounds like a better life.
Yeah, they took care of that too in the book.
Living under a bridge in a box sounds like a better life.
It’s the Gypsy lifestyle of the new world. Gypsies prefer their life to the alternatives.
I believe you mean Romani. Your choice of word is a slur
Apologies. In Westpondia nobody knows what Romani means…
Ahhh one of my favorites. The Iron Cage of Bureaucracy
I saw a funny video of an example. But I cannot remember the name for it. I tried searching for it once but failed. The conficlt was about some dude that exploded.
How topical, I wager I could use AI to find the video. 😏
You may be thinking of the first episode of the US version of Max Headroom?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk
“The only people that inactive are pensioners, the sick, or the unemployed. I mean, come on. Who really cares?”
No that wasnt it.
The video took place in an office. 2 people were in the office. I feel like the main person looked like or was Zack Gilifanakis.
Every minute the clock would announce the new time. He ended up talk to the other lady in the room about how some person on the floor above exploded or blew up or something?
I was a short skit. Only a few minutes long.
