Oct 25, 2023

The Batch - AI News & Insights: Welcome to the Halloween special issue of The Batch, where we take a look at fears associated with AI. In that spirit, I’d like to address a fear of mine: Sensationalist claims that AI could bring about human extinction will cause serious harm.

AI companies are soaring on promises they can revolutionize society while making a profit. What if they're flying too close to the sun? The latest models generate publication-worthy essays and award-winning artworks, but it’s not clear how to make them generate enough revenue...

AI is taking over the workplace. Will there be enough jobs left for people? Workers of all kinds are on the firing line as large language models, text-to-image generators, and hardware robots match their performance at a lower cost.

The latest advances in AI are built on freely available training data. What will happen if it becomes off-limits? Creative workers don’t want AI developers to train models on their works without permission or compensation, or at all. Data is vanishing as they scramble to lock it down. 

Do the latest machine learning models constitute a supercharged tech stack for cybercrime? Innovations like text generation, voice cloning, and deepfake videos give scammers powerful new ways to gain their victims’ trust and infiltrate their systems. They threaten to bring on an epidemic of e-fraud.

Large language models occasionally generate information that’s false. What if they produce output that’s downright dangerous? Text generators don’t know true from false or right from wrong. Ask an innocent question about food or health, and you might get an innocent — but fatal — answer.