Halloween

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.

A growing number of AI models can be put to purposes their designers didn’t envision. Does that include heinous deeds?

The Batch - AI News & Insights. Each year, AI brings wondrous advances. But, as Halloween approaches and the veil lifts between the material and ghostly realms, we see that spirits take advantage of these developments at least as much as humans do.

The new remote administrative assistant is a little too perky, hardworking, and efficient. Is it because he’s a bot?

Companies are using AI to screen and even interview job applicants. What happens when out-of-control algorithms are the human resources department?

Advanced AI requires advanced hardware. What if the global supply of high-end AI chips dries up? Most of the world’s advanced AI processors are manufactured in Taiwan, where tension with mainland China is rising.

AI researchers are starting to see ghosts in their machines. Are they hallucinations, or does a dawning consciousness haunt the trained weights?

Is human creativity being replaced by the synthetic equivalent? The fear: AI is cranking out increasingly sophisticated visual, musical, and literary works. AI-generated media will flood the market, squeezing out human artists and depriving the world of their creativity.

What if AI-enabled monitoring isn’t just for dictators and despots?The fear: Under the pretext of maintaining law and order, even countries founded on a commitment to individual rights allow police to take advantage of smart-city infrastructure and smart-home devices.

Is AI becoming inbred? The fear: The best models increasingly are fine-tuned versions of a small number of so-called foundation models that were pretrained on immense quantities of data scraped from the web.