WSJ Reports on 'Hard-line Activists Ramping Up for the War With AI'

The Wall Street Journal says "an intense 27-year-old activist who had been leading sit-ins at OpenAI to protest the dangers of AI" was just part of a larger movement. "The Bay Area's AI boom is drawing young disillusioned men and women to join the fight against it. They are upending their lives and leaving behind careers for think tanks, nonprofits and street protest groups."

Their cause is now riding a surge of anti-AI backlash. Many Americans are souring on the technology amid mass layoffs, data center sprawl, reports of chatbot-fueled attacks by unstable users and hacking tools that have panicked cybersecurity professionals.

Seventy percent of U.S. adults believe AI will cost jobs, and 55% believe it will do more harm than good in their daily lives, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll.

Extinction Fears

But for activists on the front lines, the driving fear is often more dramatic: human extinction. They cling to dire predictions, like Geoffrey Hinton's. The Nobel laureate, dubbed the "godfather of AI" for his work on artificial neural networks, warns of a 10% to 20% chance AI will wipe out humans.

At its most extreme and troubling end, some believe they must stop an AI apocalypse by any means necessary.

Incidents of Violence

In April, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots at the home of an Indianapolis councilman, leaving a note: "no data centers."

That same month, authorities arrested a 20-year-old Texas college student for an attack on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's home in San Francisco, and charged him with attempted murder and arson. The student was carrying an anti-AI document with a section on "our impending extinction," according to a federal criminal complaint. He has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers have said his actions appear to have been driven by an "acute mental-health crisis, not a desire to harm."

Reader Comments

Disingenuous (Score:3)

The financial apocalypse will cause the human one. It's a war on those who think that AI should control every aspect of our lives.

Re: (Score:2)

If such a financial apocalypse materializes, I would put the blame more on the way our economic system is organized and regulated (or not) than any particular technology like LLMs. Right now, the whole AI thing looks more like a bubble in the technology sector than anything which could rightfully be called a financial apocalypse. AI companies are burning through cash, and other companies aren't willing to pay enough for tokens to make AI companies profitable.

Responsibility not terror (Score:3)

The real problem is that the companies are going to try and refuse the responsibility for the AI actions. As in:

• Yes my AI was empowered to set prices, but we did not want it to set a price less than a $1000 and it set a price of 10 cents. No we do not want to give up all other transactions the AI approved.
• Yes the AI hired only christian white woman and illegally asked if they had children, but we did not mean to break the law. That was the LLM, not our fault.
• Yes the AI illegally rejected every rental applicant that was single but we did not mean to violate the Fair Housing Law. We never told it to do that, it is just the algorithm. You can't sue us if we did not intend to break the law.

No. They can definitely sue you for unintenionally breaking the law.

smh (Score:3)

I'm just throwing out ideas here, but maybe the current crop of AI execs shouldn't have gone around issuing dire warnings while claiming they had no choice but to continue developing the very technology they were warning about. That has pretty predictable consequences.

Re: Who is funding these groups (Score:2)

Organiztions do what they are paid to do (Score:2)

The Wall Street Journal used to be a very good newspaper with a moderately conservative viewpoint and an extreme (some would say nutty) Radical Right editorial page. Now it just exists to provide a veneer of respectability to whatever scheme the hard Radical Right has cooked up to demonize a new Other (or resurrect the demonization of a previous Other) and hoover more money out of the pockets of the median Citizen.

LLMs = human extinction? (Score:2)

Anyone who looks at the current state of LLM technology and fears human extinction either doesn't understand LLM tech or is wildly extrapolating.

Re: (Score:2)

Well, LLMs have been wildly mis-marketed, contributing to people not understanding them.