AI Optimism vs. AI Pessimism

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, AI Optimism versus AI Pessimism.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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Today, we are checking in on the state of the discourse around AI risk and more broadly, thinking about AI optimism versus AI pessimism.
Now, in that context, if I told you that someone had produced a commercial about AI, where the first few images are smash cuts of a burning building, a set of gravestones and mass surveillance, plus a bunch of people being stressed out because they lost their jobs and some homeless people, you might guess that that was a political ad by some anti-AI group, right? But in fact, it is not. Instead, it's the first set of images from a new ad from Anthropic. Now, the theme of the campaign is the idea of there being hope in hard questions. That's their phrase. And so what the ad actually is, is a set of very hard questions about AI taking our jobs and whether or not AI can be trusted. That's where that visceral negative imagery comes in at the beginning, moving to a set of more optimistic or positive questions. Like, could AI help me build more connections in the community? And could AI help more people feel understood? Now, on the one hand, I will say that I understand what the goal of this content asset is. It's to try to meet people where Anthropic imagines they are and acknowledge the hard stuff before pushing on into the good stuff. And yet, in practice, I think it is spectacularly tone deaf and completely fails to acknowledge the way that people actually receive media. It is a perpetuation of this long-term fetish that AI companies have had with, quote-unquote, acknowledging all the bad sides and the risks, rather than just selling the positive vision. And blame it on the tension spans or anything else, I think most people who see this aren't going to make it past the first few seconds, where it's all burning buildings and gravestones.
Now, I want to be clear, others were in disbelief as well. Sam Altman, who yesterday seemed to wake up and choose violence on Twitter, retweeted the ad and said, I thought this was satire. And I thought this was an interesting jumping off point for a larger conversation about how some of the AI societal concern discourse is evolving. Because over the last week or so, we've actually gotten a couple different examples that show what I think is a more positive direction in the practicality of that discourse. The first example of this is a new petition on the AI economy that was signed by 16 Nobel laureates. Now, if you've been paying attention for a while, you'll know that petitions calling for drastic AI policy change don't necessarily have the best track record. Maybe the best known was back in March of 2023 when the Future of Life Institute issued their AI Paws Open Letter, which called for an immediate six-month global pause on AI training for models more powerful than GPT-4. If the AI labs wouldn't voluntarily commit, the letter demanded that government step in. The letter was deeply informed by the AI safety movement and concerns of X-risk, i.e. the risk of extinction, and loomed in the regulatory conversation over the following year. Now, part of the reason that it didn't have all that much resonance is that the risks that they were talking about were so clearly disconnected from the state of the technology at that GPT-4 moment that for most casual observers, the response didn't really seem connected to the state of the moment. Now, ultimately, nothing much came of the AI Pause movement other than a group of dedicated adherents that carry the message forward. This resulted in entirely grounded and realistic works like the book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, released last year. Another effort to stymie AI development sprang up earlier this year, again led by the Future of Life Institute. This time, the petition was called the Pro-Human AI Declaration and focused on guidelines for ensuring that AI development was human-focused. It featured a string of restrictions around the well-being of children, limits to the data center buildout, and the preservation of human agency and liberty. The most notable part of this effort was the broad cross-section of signatories. Both Steve Bannon and former Bernie Sanders staffers found themselves in a secret meeting to hash out the details of their demands, ultimately signing up for a common cause.