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Comment by southernplaces7 | Hacker News Reader

If anything, the entire narrative around AI "safety" is essentially a propaganda win for OpenAI and other major players. It let's them keep pandering to legislators in the push for "safety regulations" that are in reality an attempt to seal off corporate AI behind a competition killing walled garden of new laws.

Current AI is nowhere near anything resembling an all-consuming AGI monster. The reality is so far from this that it's laughable and the uses of current AI are (except in terms of possible scale at which visual and text sludge can be produced) not much different from the kind of human-created spam and visual sludge made until recently mostly by humans, many of them minimally paid third world content mill writers.

I'd love to read a specifically enumerated list of other real dangers.

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The danger isn't that the AI will gain sapience and decide to kill everyone, it's that people will assume that because an LLM could generate a reasonable overview of a large corpus of texts it can also drive a car, manage the power grid, detect l33t cyborhackors, calculate the optimum price for treasury securities, manage my retirement account or add numbers together.

The leaders who have nearly killed us all so far never demonstrated math skills. I'd be more worried that it gets Altman's weasel skills.

Having worked in government, I can assure you (most) democratically elected leaders can do math. And often hire people who are much better at math than they are. What you may be observing is the assumption the electorate isn't paying attention and can't do math. And for the most part it seems they aren't and they can't.

No, the only propaganda is the billions of $ telling you “don’t worry about possible harm, regulations are bad, us VCs, Trillion $ corps, and wannabe billionaires have your best interest in mind.”

A16z and YC are vehemently against the CA and DC regulation right now.

Out of LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton, the one with $10m on the line says not to worry and the professor and resigned-Google-to-warn-you are saying hmm this is very serious…

Nothing you said refutes the above commentator. In fact it sounds like you worship at the alter of AI Safety.

Do you worship at the altar* of Climate Change Safety for believing the scientists vs. the energy corporations?

it's tough living in a world with regulation, eh?

Yes, particularly when the regulations are being pushed for by the very corporate interests that they're supposedly aimed at, because said regulations are asinine, dishonest and based on very specific, specifically crafted types of fear mongering. On the other hand, other regulations (that already exist and do get applied against lesser mortals!) magically don't have the same teeth against major AI players. These rules involving things like mass use of other people's media with next to no permission.

Regulations can be good, but it would first be nice if they were applied with at least a modicum of rationality and fairness.

Alas. Ayn Rand has passed and we have no one to save us from the communists in government.

So you're just trolling then.. The alternative is that you're so absurdly dogmatic in defending regulations no matter their provenance, underlying reasons, or cost that anyone who criticizes the many shades of grey around certain regulations is automatically some sort of Randian libertarian fanatic.

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