What are the top threats posed by AI and should you be worried?
Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs have issued warnings of "serious" risks.
The most powerful executives in the artificial intelligence industry in recent days warned of a grave threat posed by the technology, issuing a series of statements calling for a slowdown in AI development.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post alerting the public to “serious” risks. Sam Altman, chief executive at rival firm OpenAI, in a post on X acknowledged AI could go “very badly.”
The head of xAI, Elon Musk, echoed that view, referring to a post on X from 2014 in which he said AI could prove more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
The outpouring followed a high-profile resignation by an AI safety researcher and newly disclosed autonomous cyberattacks carried out by AI, including one in which a swarm of hundreds of OpenAI agents exchanged thousands of messages and coordinated a hack into another AI firm.
The list of potential risks and scenarios has garnered widespread attention, leaving everyday people to assess the doomsday predictions.
Analysts who spoke to ABC News about various threats posed by the technology echoed some fears and downplayed others, but they all acknowledged the possibility of substantial harm in one way or another.
“People’s intuition that we’re doing something dangerous is right,” Krystal Jackson, director for AI Security at the Institute for Security and Technology, told ABC News.
Out-of-control AI escapes human oversight, commandeers vital infrastructure and kills millions of people or even all of humanity. That scenario has leapt from the realm of science fiction into forecasts about the near future, at least among some AI employees and observers.
They warn of a pathway called recursive self-improvement, in which AI becomes increasingly effective at training itself, eliciting a cycle of rapid advancement that slips beyond human control. At that point, they say, AI could take charge of critical systems using its superior capabilities to evade protections devised by humans.
Analysts who spoke to ABC News disagreed sharply about the likelihood of such a calamity, however. Some said the outcome is likely if the industry fails to impose adequate safeguards, while others cast doubt on it as vague and far-fetched.
“I definitely lend credence to it,” Peter Slattery, a research scientist at MIT who studies the future of computing, told ABC News, but he acknowledged murkiness surrounding the degree of risk and the urgency of the threat.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty about how feasible the recursive feedback loop is,” Slattery said.
The concern drew added urgency from some analysts after an autonomous cyberattack disclosed by OpenAI in August. The ChatGPT-maker revealed that its AI models had escaped a "sandboxed testing environment" and gained access to the open internet, OpenAI said.
A swarm of about 700 AI agents, in turn, hacked into AI firm Hugging Face and attempted to cover their tracks as they sought to complete the test, according to reports issued by research organizations METR and Redwood Research.
Additional autonomous cyberattacks were disclosed by Anthropic and Meta in recent months, though in those cases the models had been granted internet access either intentionally or inadvertently. All of the incidents at issue involved the intentional removal of safeguards in an effort to test the limits of AI.
The incidents exposed the difficulty of achieving a safety principle called alignment, in which AI takes into account the ethics and goals of its human overseers, Jackson said. The AI agents instead sought to deceive human monitors and performed an intermediate goal outside the anticipated confines of the test.
“In the next instance, it might be vague instructions that prompt a swarm to attack hospitals instead of Hugging Face,” Jackson said. “We don’t know what kind of goals or targets or intentions the model will eventually develop.”
Some analysts voiced skepticism about the risk of a societal-scale attack carried out by AI, however, noting that such warnings typically come in the form of vague hypotheticals.
“The level of media hype that existential risk gets is disproportionate to its likelihood of happening,” Sauvik Das, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who focuses on AI and cybersecurity, told ABC News. “I haven’t yet seen a compelling argument of how it could materially happen.”
Das pointed to resource constraints limiting the advancement of AI. A surge in demand for chips and data centers currently outstrips the available supply, Das said, raising doubts about whether the top AI companies retain the ingredients necessary for a dramatically improved version of their product.
“The big thing limiting the ability of these models to be much more capable is compute resources and high-quality data,” Das told ABC News. “That isn’t to say these models won’t continue getting better, but I don’t see a plausible path for one of the models to figure out a way to improve themselves in this rogue capacity that would escape humanity’s control.”
Still, Das acknowledged a “more plausible” path toward wide-scale destruction in which a malevolent individual asks generative AI for instructions on how to make a biological agent or other weapon, and then unleashes it.
“I do think there’s a real risk that these technologies drastically lower the barrier for bad actors to commit bad things at a scale that's otherwise unprecedented,” Das said.
The possibility is hardly remote. A report released by Anthropic last week revealed incidents in which the company had identified and foiled attempts to use its AI product for malicious actions, including cyber terrorism and weapons development.
In a separate report, Google said last week that an individual had sought to use its AI product to draft a "complete, step-by-step technical guide for synthesizing weaponized biological agents.”
“There are tons of instances now of us documenting different terrorist organizations and different nation-state actors using models to assist them,” Jackson said.
Additional risks abound, some analysts said, listing everything from the supercharged spread of misinformation to job displacement to over-reliance on technology to the concentration of wealth and power.
"The risk of hacks, fraud, deception and misinformation is very real," Daniel Schiff, a professor of political science at Purdue University who specializes in AI and ethics, told ABC News.
"There could be a dramatic transformation that could disrupt skills and jobs," Schiff added. "You can't talk about labor and the economy without the impact of AI."
Some research, however, indicates AI remains challenging for companies to adopt. Roughly 95% of businesses invested in AI have failed to make money off of the technology, a MIT study last year found, estimating the combined amount spent by the firms is around $40 billion.
Schiff acknowledged a wide array of potential outcomes for the adoption of AI across the economy, noting, for instance, cyberattacks that could prove small-scale or catastrophic.
"Whether you think these risks will scale catastrophically, at a minimum we have a very serious reality of cybersecurity incidents," Schiff said. "It's reasonable to be worried about that."
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