To be fair, generative AI is wrecking society in new and unexpected ways every week. From lies and misinformation to people choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships, there's a profound impact on society that will only get worse in the coming years. The look for junior programmers who are capable enough to get anything done when the AI is down has been depressing, and things are looking much worse for the years to come.

Important safety features ("do not generate child porn", "statements should be factual or backed by evidence") were simply not part of the design of these systems and have yet to truly solved to this day, but AI companies decided to release these technologies onto the general public regardless of their glaring flaws.

I like AI for its shitposting capabilities and its neat parlour tricks, but I also believe so far it has been a net negative for everyone but the richest minority of society who benefits from firing people and having computers do half their jobs badly. It's too late now, but in hindsight I do agree that these systems were too dangerous to release in this shape.

I feel like it could be a law that there is essentially no way to guarantee that AI is any more or less safe than humans. It kinda seems incompatible with what we understand to be "intelligence" which arguably requires a certain unpredictable freedom...Has a method of "baking in" such safety features even been conceptualized? Or is it just a matter of nurturing/raising/policing them after the fact and hoping for the best like with us?

Kind of taking this a step further, what is the worst thing that an AI run amok could do to existentially threaten the human race? I feel like almost anything could be short-circuited by some form of "pulling the plug" before it got too far. But, hypothetically, if it were possible to launch nukes without human intervention, or with maybe a small amount that could be socially engineered, that seems plausible (or releasing some kind of super-pathogen that is stored in a lab somewhere).

So, what if, along the lines of MAD doctrine and the plot of Battlestar Galactica, the best thing we could do for AI safety is just to engineer our other systems so that a hypothetical superhuman adversary could not use them against us? Which is just making our world safer all around rather than trying to kludge arbitrary limitations into an "intelligent" system.

(This doesn't really solve AI child porn and fake news but those things are mostly just imaginative reflections of the people using them and you can't really fix that any more than you can stop people from doing it themselves)

AI is often better than therapy as reported by users. Therapy has some inherent dark-patterns that AI doesn't have yet, like the therapist's financial incentive to trickle a solution to your problem to preserve their income.

AI gives more than a billion people instant access to knowledge, it is starting to accelerate scientific research, it democratized software development, design, and illustration.

I strongly disagree with the opinion that it has been a net negative.

Lies and misinformation, or choosing chatbots over therapy and relationships might sound scary, but as of now I see practically negligible impact there. Even social media is still roughly as usable as before AI.

With ai I can get government bodies to do their job. Escalate and make formal complaints until it’s done. Manually would take ages to find the right law and draft a proper complaint.