AI companies are marketing their products as powerful and potentially problematic to “humanity,” which critics say is a distraction from the harm they’re actually doing.
In the BBC article “Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them,” experts say that there may some psychology at play.
“It’s just part of this pattern of unsubstantiated claims of power,” TPL Faculty Associate Emily Bender said in the article.
The significance of the problems that companies are raising alarms around, as well as the potential they’re promising, take the spotlight from true impacts.
“They’re saying ‘look over here,’ never mind the environmental destruction and the labour exploitation and all these systems we’re destroying in society. We just have to worry about making sure this thing doesn’t turn into the bad one that destroys humanity.”