Yes, there is a lot of bunk AI safety discussions. But there are legitimate concerns as well. AI is close to human level. Logically they become dangerous, specially if given autonomy and bad goals. Many of the accredited researchers recognize this.

There is some level that you can discuss AI safety without AI expertise (specially as of a few years ago where everything as so uncertain), but I think currently you need a lot of awareness of physical and computational limits. Taking those limits into account, we're clearly very close to human level intelligences that can scale in unpredictable ways (probably not "grey goo" ways), but potentially dangerous ways under various scenarios, including manipulating our digital lives if there are humongous AI systems controlling everything as we are in danger of getting into as a society.

I think there's also a lot of elitism toward humanities implied that you should try to get past too. Humanities have a lot of insights about human nature, even if not all of it is reliable. See philosophers like Derek Parfit.

(in case you're wondering, I've implemented a few AIs mostly RL algorithms)