Existential risk from artificial general intelligence

When a journalist for an online gun website asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT to provide him a summary of the case The Second Amendment Foundation v. Robert Ferguson earlier this year, he said the AI chatbot quickly spat out an answer. It confidently, allegedly claimed the case involved a Georgia radio host named Mark Walters who was accused of embezzling money from The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF). The only problem: none of that was true. In reality, Walters had nothing to do with the suit at all. Instead, Walters claims he…

Companies are beginning to dive into the AI workforce headfirst—at least that’s what the data are saying. A new report says that AI is responsible for almost 4,000 job cuts last month alone.Maybe AI-Written Scripts are a Bad Idea?The report comes from Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, Inc., an outplacement firm headquartered in Chicago. The company’s May report says that U.S.-based companies announced 80,089 job cuts last month, and 3,900 of those are directly related to artificial intelligence. May’s job cuts are a 20%…

Illustration: Ole.CNX (Shutterstock)ChatGPT’s Creator Buddies Up to Congress | Future TechThis week a group of well-known and reputable AI researchers signed a statementconsisting of 22 words: Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.As a professor of AI, I am also in favour of reducing any risk, and prepared to work on it personally. But any statement worded in such a way is bound to create alarm, so its authors should…

Photo: Win McNamee (Getty Images)Generating Video Via Text? | Future TechTakeaways:A new federal agency to regulate AI sounds helpful but could become unduly influenced by the tech industry. Instead, Congress can legislate accountability.Instead of licensing companies to release advanced AI technologies, the government could license auditors and push for companies to set up institutional review boards.The government hasn’t had great success in curbing technology monopolies, but disclosure requirements and data privacy…

Humans today are developing perhaps the most powerful technology in our history: artificial intelligence. The societal harms of AI — including discrimination, threats to democracy, and the concentration of influence — are already well-documented. Yet leading AI companies are in an arms race to build increasingly powerful AI systems that will escalate these risks at a pace that we have not seen in human history.The Boogeyman's Sophie Thatcher Reveals What Draws Her to Dark Characters | io9 InterviewAs our leaders grapple…

Sam Altman wants to hit the reset button. The OpenAI CEO threw a tantrum last week when it became apparent that the European Union planned to go ahead with a proposed law that would institute a broad regulatory framework to protect against the more disruptive impacts of artificial intelligence. While Altman himself has called for AI regulation and even proposed a new AI regulatory agency before Congress, his response was to threaten to pull ChatGPT and other OpenAI products out of Europe entirely if the law went forward:…

Over 350 AI executives, researchers, and industry leaders signed a one-sentence warning released Tuesday, saying that we should try to stop their technology from destroying the world. ChatGPT’s Creator Buddies Up to Congress | Future Tech“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads the statement, released by the Center for AI Safety. The signatories including Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google…

In a few short months, the idea of convincing news articles written entirely by computers have evolved from perceived absurdity into a reality that’s already confusing some readers. Now, writers, editors, and policymakers are scrambling to develop standards to maintain trust in a world where AI-generated text will increasingly appear scattered in news feeds.Generating Video Via Text? | Future TechMajor tech publications like CNET have already been caught with their hand in the generative AI cookie jar and have had to…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose company has become one of the most lucrative ventures for the rollout of artificial intelligence, has also worked to become one of the new figureheads for AI regulation. It’s a hard line to walk, and while he managed to make a number of U.S. congresspeople smile and nod along, he hasn’t found the same success in Europe. He’s now been forced to clarify what his company’s plans are for keeping on outside the U.S. ChatGPT’s Creator Buddies Up to Congress | Future TechDuring a stop in London, UK…

ChatGPT is back up and running after a major outage Thursday morning. The large language model-powered chatbot is usually accessed through OpenAI’s website, but starting before 7:23 A.M. ET and up until 8:27 A.M. ET that site was down. Prior to the total outage, related increased reports of problems seem to have started shortly after 5 A.M. ET, according to Downdetector.NPR Is Going Dark on Twitter | Future TechOpenAI acknowledged the issue in an incident report on its status tracking page. “ChatGPT is seeing elevated…