Halloween

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Drones are becoming the deadliest weapons in today’s war zones, and they’re not just following orders. Should AI decide who lives or dies?

For decades, AI developers have treated the web as an open faucet of training data. Now publishers are shutting the tap. Will web data dry up?

Leading AI companies are spending mountains of cash in hopes that the technology will deliver outsize profits before investors lose patience. Are exuberant bets on big returns grounded in the quicksand of wishful thinking?

Conversations with chatbots are loosening users’ grips on reality, fueling the sorts of delusions that can trigger episodes of severe mental illness. Are AI models driving us insane?

Training successive neural networks on the outputs of previous networks gradually degrades performance. Will future models succumb to the curse of recursive training?

The universe of web pages includes correct answers to common questions that are used to test large language models. How can we evaluate new models if they’ve studied the answers before we give them the test?

AI coding assistants are brewing codebases that once were the sole province of human programmers. Will AI systems take over software development?

Politicians and pundits have conjured visions of doom to convince lawmakers to clamp down on AI. What if terrified legislators choke off innovation in AI?

The globe’s growing AI infrastructure requires huge amounts of electricity, possibly more than power providers can generate responsibly. Could AI models suck energy resources dry?

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.