New Anthropic Ad Implies AI Could Kill Us All

Uncategorized

Anthropic is doing what Anthropic does best: putting on its most concerned face so it can convince you they’re the good guys in the industry.

Last week, the world’s most valuable AI startup revealed a new commercial that took an unorthodox approach to promoting its technology. Rather than diving straight into bubbly optimism, it starts with a series of grim images as we hear voiceovers from different speakers ask some hard-hitting questions about AI. 

You couldn’t blame someone for thinking they were watching a PSA. It starts with a burning house — which always bodes well. When someone asks, “Can AI be trusted?” we’re shown what looks like surveillance footage with an AI algorithm scanning the faces of everyone in a crowd.

The most striking sequence comes right after.

“Who’s going to hit the brakes if we need to?” another voice says. Then it cuts to an image of a cemetery lined with hundreds of headstones.

You don’t need to ask Claude to explain this one to you. Anthropic is clearly acknowledging the fear that AI could kill us all.

But this is actually a feel-good story — at least in the eyes of Anthropic. The tagline, “There’s hope in hard questions,” assures the viewer that their concerns over AI — like its potential to destroy jobs or erode or ability to think — are all perfectly valid, but more importantly, that these are questions which Anthropic’s leaders are keeping themselves up at night grappling with.

“People have a lot of hard questions about AI,” an announcement from the company states. “It’s our job to address them.”

The commercial, which aired during the World Cup quarterfinal clash between Argentina and Switzerland over the weekend, quickly drew criticism online. One viral post mocked the thinking behind the ad, writing, “When we raise the question of stopping a dangerously powerful superintelligence we show 300 American gravestones for half a second.”

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fired a shot.

“i thought this was satire,” he wrote in his typical all-lowercase style.

The ad is Anthropic in a nutshell. A key part of the company’s mythology is that it was founded by former OpenAI employees who wanted to focus on safe AI development. CEO Dario Amodei claims that he could’ve been the one to release a chatbot that changed the world instead of OpenAI with ChatGPT, but held off because he was too concerned about the tech’s risks.

Amodei has also been strikingly forward about AI’s risks, saying it could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, while dangling the possibility that its models may already be conscious. Recently, the company even called for a global “pause” on AI development because it feared the technology could spiral out of human control. (It also hired an economist who said that a 33 percent risk of human extinction from AI was acceptable.)

Those may seem like counterproductive things for the creator of one of the most widely used chatbots in the world to say. But it all serves a very deliberate point. By being the ones that doomsay about AI the most, Anthropic can also present itself as the only company that can be trusted to develop it

Its actual track record suggests otherwise. In February, it dropped a key safety pledge that vowed it would stop training an AI system if it couldn’t guarantee it had proper guardrails in place. And while it fought with the Pentagon against its tech being used in mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry, it emerged that its Claude AI was being used to select strike targets in Iran.

One person responding to the company’s ad said it best: “Can Anthropic be trusted?”

More on AI: New York Becomes First State to Ban AI Data Centers

The post New Anthropic Ad Implies AI Could Kill Us All appeared first on Futurism.

IN the summer of 2019, I was seated in the wine cellar of a walled Medieval town high above the Dordogne Valley of France, not far from Sarlat-la-Canéda, making phone calls, writing reports. I have given this story in other places and it appears as though you’re about to hear it again. Rob Skiba is a name you that you might be familiar with. Though he had made a name for himself as a Nephilim researcher, more recently Rob had taken a dive into the deep end of the pool via flat earth research. The recorded interviews I conducted between he and Rick Hummer, a fellow flat earth investigator and close friend of his, was published while still occupying that very wine cellar. Read all about it. Chicago Is Not a Mirage.

Word quickly spread. Within a few short weeks, dozens of flat earth researchers began accepting my invite for a private interview, if not a series of interviews. From a 17th-century tower built by King Louis XIV, and with a stunning view of the Alps, I sat down with Robbie Davidson, founder of the Flat Earth International Conferences, conducting multiple sessions. While staying in Dumfries, Scotland, David Weiss agreed to take part in the interviews, as did Bob Knodel of Globebusters. There were others. But when I asked the interviewees to discuss the moments that shaped their lives, among the many PSYOPs, false flag attacks, and hoaxes that were discussed, only these men committed commentary to the false 9/11 narrative.

The resulting recordings ballooned into The Unexpected Cosmology, a book which became a website and was even intended as an anthology. And of course, the following discourse was originally a chapter. It was Walt Disney who stated, “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” Those sentiments remain applicable here as well. American Sensationalism: The 9/11 Interviews was always intended to be expanded upon with the inclusion of new researchers. So I’m sorry to say the project became stagnant during the Covid-19 psychodrama. I took a break to tackle other projects. We lost Rob Skiba. Rob offered hours of private conversation regarding his life but we never got around to the big one. 9/11. It was in the cards. Sadly, Bob Knodel died soon afterwards. Voices are being squeezed from an entire generation. Gnosis passes with them.

In the aftermath, the FE community became fractured. People began going their separate ways. Robbie Davidson, among a noted few others who were interviewed for the project, got up and left the movement altogether. It is not my intent to erase his or the contributions of others if only brief. They came, they went, their testimonies remain.

The original vision may have hit roadblocks but it is not forgotten. I expanded this paper a few years later to include testimony from author Pauly Hart, a dear friend of mine. I had wanted to continue that trend every year thereafter but you know how it goes. For the 25th anniversary of the attack I have redirected my efforts to its first large scale expansion, including Andrew Hoy and Darrin Geisinger into the mix. Perhaps others will lend their experiences to the recorder in time.

The following is their report.

Watch the Interviews