that fear of an AI takeover is "preposterously ridiculous." Sarah Myers West, managing director of the nonprofit AI Now Institute, told ABC News: "A lot of this is more rhetoric than grounded analysis."
As AI develops, however, an imperative for onlookers is clear, he said: "We can't sit on the sidelines." Doomsday forecasts, however, lack granular specifics and overstate the potential for self-awareness to form within generative AI like ChatGPT, which scans text from across the internet and strings words together based on statistical probability, Myers West said.
Acknowledging a lack of specifics in some prominent messages about the extreme risks, such as the open letter released by CAIS in May, Russell said: "Once you get into specifics, you end up with arguments about which is the most plausible." Hendrycks, of CAIS, added: "Since AI touches on many aspects of society, we end up finding there are many, many risk sources."
"We have no choice but to acknowledge that AI's changes are coming, and in many cases are already here. We ignore them at our own peril," Schumer said last month in prepared remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I think that to purely focus on the future is to the detriment of the existing harms that are coming about or that there's an immediate risk of," Jones told ABC News.