Sam Altman says AI will make ‘bad things’ happen. Exhibit A: needless death

AI is already implicated in violent deaths and nearly started world war three. Those bad things? They only happen to other people, I argue in The Guardian.

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has some words for you about his company and the future of artificial intelligence.

“One of the differences between us and some of the stricter AI safety people is that we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency [to use it],” Altman told Politico’s new technology podcast and newsletter Decoded.

Yikes. This statement – and the approach it represents – is, well, problematic, to say the least. It’s also emblematic of precisely the kind of world-building and world-destroying that is happening with today’s technology in front of all our eyes, with precious little input from the rest of us.

Altman’s mention of the “bad things” that AI might bring makes it sound like AI’s failures mistakenly create innocent, minor problems or even silly little episodes, such as the time when Google’s “AI Overviews” told users to put non-toxic glue on pizza so the cheese will be less likely to slide off. Good advice is helpful. Bad advice? Chalk it up to being a bad thing.

But culinary adventurism is hardly the only realm that AI operates in and the damage AI is inflicting has already and repeatedly proven itself to be dangerous and even potentially deadly to humans.

OpenAI is embroiled in a lawsuit after the tragic suicide of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old student who initially began using OpenAI’s ChatGPT for homework help. The family’s lawsuit alleges that the teenager took his own life with the chatbot’s encouragement. (OpenAI has claimed Raine misused the platform.)

And Raine’s action is hardly the only one. OpenAI is facing multiple lawsuits filed by different families of victims of suicide and self-harm.

Nor is suicide the only “bad thing” to emerge in the AI universe. In February of this year, on the first day of the war in Iran, two Tomahawk missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the city of Minab, killing at least 120 children. (A UN fact-finding mission concluded that the US was probably responsible for the strike.)

In a recent investigation into the attack, Bloomberg News reported that an AI-linked system was used to target the school. In this case, the system is called Maven, and it is made by Palantir.

Unnamed defense officials told Bloomberg that “inside Centcom, which conducted the US attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System”. The report also adds that “in the past year, the Defense Department has rapidly made Maven a cornerstone of the US military apparatus”.

AI is helping to produce these tragic and needless deaths, but bad things happen, I guess.

Or there’s the little detail that the US may have come within a hair’s breadth of starting a major war against a superpower, all due to an AI error…

Read the rest here.