Banking. The energy sector. Mining. Chemical industries.
AI companies are still very silent about the actual risks of their products. That this is addictive, that it causes atrophy, that its usage among children is bad for their education, that in worst cases it psychosis, and is often used to harm others and for criminal activities.
This reminds me of the behavior of cigarette companies. Except instead of only staying silent on the risks of their products (and funding pseudo-scientific studies to muddy the waters) they invent risks which do not exist. And then use these stories as evidence for these made up risks. In the non-AI world this is called consumer hostile behavior, but in AI the fact that their products are faulty, and unsafe, is called misalignment.
I don’t think this kind of gaslighting is unique or new, but the AI company’s specific melange of fear-mongering, disingenuous helplessness, ethics-washing, with a handy wildcard of regulatory capture is perhaps uniquely optimized and (so far) effective.
It's almost like avoiding accountability for the sake of the share value is a systemic problem encouraged by the way we have currently arranged ourselves
https://www.fastcompany.com/90781961/how-automakers-insidiou...
“In the 1920s, auto groups redefined who owned the city street. It was [originally the] drivers’ job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them,” says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. “But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it’s your fault if you get hit.”
ie under the banner of "pedestrian safety" that was illustrated by numerous examples of grisly accidents, automobile manufacturing lobbyists pushed jay-walking laws and essentially took all city streets away from pedestrian use, entrenching reliance on cars for transportation and urban design to match
the idea here was to portray cars as inevitable, necessary things that were going to kill people anyway (just like how AI is inevitably going to lead to mass security breaches) and really it's the pedestrian's (or the maintainer's) job to avoid being harmed
The equivalent to the "AI companies" pitch would've been the car companies lobbying to make cars much safer therefore raising the bar for competitors to join the market. Like if Henry Ford was the only person to own the patent for air bags and then lobbied hard to regulate that every car shipped with one.
that it also serves as marketing material for just how capable their models are is just a cherry on top, I suppose
the point of these 'disclosures' is AGI branding - wow we have such a dangerous new product, it (consciously, autonomously) escaped confinement!
their whole business is selling capability. and what better advertising than to say that your model is just a little too capable sometimes