Ed Zitron, pulling no punches:
It’s time to treat OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and any other company pushing generative AI with suspicion, to see their acts as an investor-approved act of deception, theft, and destruction. There is no reason to humor their “stages of artificial intelligence”—it’s time to ask them where the actual intelligence is, where the profits are, how we get past the environmental destruction and the fact that they’ve trained on billions of pieces of stolen media, something that every single journalist should consider an insult and a threat. And when they give vague, half-baked answers, the response should be to push harder, to look them in the eye and ask “why can’t you tell me?”
Go and read the whole thing. We’all should be outraged at how these billionaire con artists continue to plunder our cultural resources and poison our information ecosystem while distracting us with this five-stages nonsense along their completely bogus promise of artificial general intelligence as carrot and their equally completely bogus threat of creating a humanity-destroying superintelligence as stick.
As @SwiftonSecurity put it:
Literally every argument about AI risk is entirely made up from exactly nothing. All the terminology is fart-huffing. It has the same evidentiary basis as a story about floopflorps on Gavitron9 outcompeting nuubidons.
And, boy, does Sam Altman have a keen sense of risk and human values! Lobbying for an “oversight” agency—which would effectively create an AI market-controlling monopoly or oligopoly—to prevent humanity-destroying superintelligence from happening has been described, as I wrote about at the time, as calling with a straight face for environmental regulations to prevent the creation of Godzilla. (And don’t miss this Honest Government Ad on the risks of AI!)
Yes, the first cracks do appear (PDF) in the hype machine, and the light you can see falling through these cracks comes from colossal piles of money on fire. Generative AI as such will certainly stay with us and do marvelous things that are both beneficial and evil, but the grandiose earth-shattering, humanity-changing claims from these serial snake-oil merchants will sooner or later go the way of the dodo—just like those grandiose claims around 3D printing, Mars colonies, crypto, blockchain, or Level 5 autonomous cars.
