This needs far more context for an educated discussion.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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In the picture you can see organizations moving in the public sphere around AI. On the left you have right-wing and libertarian think tanks, corporations and frontline actors that fuel a sense of panic around AI, either to sabotage their business competitors or to leverage this panic to project an idea of being sellers of a very powerful tool while at the same time deflecting responsibility. If the AI is dangerous and sentient, you won't care much about the engineers behind.
On the right you have several public orgs or NGOs operating in the field of algorithmic accountability, digital rights and so on. They push the opposite of the AI panic, pointing the finger at the corporations and powers that create and govern AI
Hey thanks for adding this context!
Can I get an explanation as to how these companies are “marketers of ai panic”?
They are directly selling AI-based products and services. They release or boost sensational stories about those capabilities through their various channels of media influence so they can make their products seem more powerful and useful than they really are. The sensationalisation widens the window on what seems possible even if it's nowhere near the reality. Even people who don't buy into those notions about society-destroying automation or humanity-threatening emergence are more likely to buy into stuff that seems tamer but still lacks any substantial proof of viability like AI driving or AI written movie scripts.
Never having heard the term AI panic makes this kinda meaningless. But I guess AI panic is evil, as it is promoted by the typically more evil companies?
You might have heard of singularity, sentient AI, uprising of the ai, job losses due to automation. That's all propaganda that sits under the concept of AI panic.
It's ridiculous to call ideas that have existed for half a century propaganda just because we're now approaching those things...
But how are Microsoft and other LLM companies marketing on AI Panic?
I honestly don’t understand what this graph means. I don’t get what the four sectors mean, how the author decided to distribute companies among the four sectors, or why the four sectors are divided into two equivalent circles.
How is OpenAI evil?
They published a deliberately harmful tool against the advice of civil society, experts and competitors. They are not only reckless but tasked since their foundation with the mission to create chaos. Don't forget the idea behind OpenAI in the beginning was to damage the advantage that Google and Facebook had on AI by releasing machine learning technology in open source. They definitely did it and now they are expanding their goals. They are not in for the money (ChatGPT will never be profitable), they are playing a bigger game.
Pushing the AI panic is not just a marketing strategy but a way to build power. The more they are considered dangerous, the more regulations will be passed that will impact the whole sector. https://fortune.com/2023/05/30/sam-altman-ai-risk-of-extinction-pandemics-nuclear-warfare/
deliberately harmful tool ???
I am using it, and yes, it can be inaccurate sometimes, but deliberately harmful?
The link that you gave is not about this AI, but potential danger of some future AGI, which would have to be more powerful than this one.
This paper explain a taxonomy of harms created by LLMs: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3531146.3533088
OpenAI released ChatGPT without systems to prevent or compensate these harms and being fully aware of the consequences, since this kind of research has been going on for several years. In the meanwhile they've put some paper-thin countermeasures on some of these problems but they are still pretty much a shit-show in terms of accountability. Most likely they will get sued into oblivion before regulators outlaw LLMs with dialogical interfaces. This won't do much for the harm that open-source LLMs will create but at least will limit large-scale harm to the general population.
I can only imagine what would happen if these authors were to write about internet.
There are entire fields of research on that. Or do you believe the internet, a technology developed for military purposes, an infrastructure that supports most of the economy, the medium through billions of people experience most of reality and build connections, is free from ideology and propaganda?
That’s my point, nearly everything in life have good and bad sides, you have to use it accordingly. Would you believe if I say that a banal kitchen knife can be used to murder people? Those kitchen knife manufacturers released a product which is a harmful tool! And they knew that!
Being free from ideology and propaganda is a different argument than "being deliberately harmful". Almost nothing is free from ideology and propaganda.
If by panic you mean AI hype, then maybe.
For example, this post is just as sensationalist.