Because these people understand human psychology and how to play on fears (of doom, or missing out) and insecurities of people, and write compelling narratives while sounding smart.

They are great at selling stories - they sold the story of the crypto utopia, now switching their focus to AI.

This seems to be another appeal to enforce AI regulation in the name of 'AI safetyiism', which was made 2 years ago but the threats in it haven't really panned out.

For example an oft repeated argument is the dangerous ability of AI to design chemical and biological weapons, I wish some expert could weigh in on this, but I believe the ability to theorycraft pathogens effective in the real world is absolutely marginal - you need actual lab work and lots of physical experiments to confirm your theories.

Likewise the dangers of AI systems to exfiltrate themselves to multi-million dollar AI datacenter GPU systems everyone supposedly just has lying about, is ... not super realistc.

The ability of AIs to hack computer systems is much less theoretical - however as AIs will get better at black-hat hacking, they'll get better at white-hat hacking as well - as there's literally no difference between the two, other than intent.

And here in lies a crucial limitation of alignment and safetyism - sometimes there's no way to tell apart harmful and harmless actions, other than whether the person undertaking them means well.