Former Anthropic Researcher warns “AI could kill us all”

[gagzus 24,671]

Multiple current and former Anthropic employees warned — and admitted — on Tuesday that the researchers building new AI models believe the technology could lead to humanity’s destruction by the end of the decade, reflecting the industry’s frenzy over reining in rapid development. 

Jacob Coxon, a former AI researcher at Anthropic, wrote on X that he resigned from the company on Tuesday because he believed the Dario Amodei-led company and OpenAI, his former employer, were “gambling with our lives” in how they improved the technology.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote. “This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/ai-could-kill-us-all-anthropic-researcher-jacob-coxon-1236855688/

Edited 4 hours ago by gagzus

[Roughhouse Dandy 13,819]

I mean.... duh. 

But no one is going to listen because the general population is stupid and the "elite" parasite don't care because they think their money and resources make them above consequences. 

The only way this AI track is getting derailed is if it stops looking profitable to the people invested in it. 

Edited 4 hours ago by Roughhouse Dandy

[NUTELLA 29,621]

I know it sounds conspiratorial... but I believe the technological singularity creeps closer every day (don't look it up unless you want to go down a rabbit hole)

But I guess it's a double-edged sword. Anyone struggling with fears/anxieties about future decades/growing older can probably breathe a sigh of relief... because it is possible humanity will become extinct sooner rather than later

[Shadow 6,705]

Why is Anthropic destroying books?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/05/anthropic-ai-destroying-books

At a time when American students are failing to read... 

U.S. Reading Scores Plummet on Global Exam 

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/us/us-reading-test-scores-pisa.html

College Students Are Testing at the Level of 10-Year-Olds

https://futurism.com/future-society/college-students-oecd-reading-literacy-10-year-old

US tech sector is on this mad dash to stay ahead of China with AI, yet the Chinese do a better job teaching their students to read.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2331186X.2016.1248187#abstract

 

[gagzus 24,671]

15 minutes ago, Roughhouse Dandy said:

I mean.... duh. 

But no one is going to listen because the general population is stupid and the "elite" parasite don't care because they think their money and resources make them above consequences. 

The only way this AI track is getting derailed is if it stops looking profitable to the people invested in it. 

I think the only way it’ll get derailed and controlled is if there’s a mass amount of stolen identity and data. Or if there’s a mass influx of CSAM made with AI.

The second AI is used to derail, leak details of or deface politicians and public figures THEN it’ll finally get under control.

Edited 3 hours ago by gagzus

[Lemon Blood 661]

Ok why is this coming literally a day after I wrote a song called “Apocalypse” about AI

[PlastiscGuy 22,631]

I hope so

[FfFfFfFF 58,615]

Sudennly I want to send ChatGPT my former teacher's adress. 

[Creyk 18,779]

When AI was only giving a 2x or 3x research speedup, it was easy to dismiss as the equivalent of hiring good personal assistants. Now it’s more obvious that AIs are themselves dominating AI research. People had long talked about an “AI arms race” in a sort of metaphorical sense. But now the mood in the government silo is as grim as during the worst part of the Cold War. 

[Roughhouse Dandy 13,819]

18 minutes ago, gagzus said:

I think the only way it’ll get derailed and controlled is if there’s a mass amount of stolen identity and data. Or if there’s a mass influx of CSAM made with AI.

The second AI is used to derail, leak details of or deface politicians and public figures THEN it’ll finally get under control.

They've already laid the groundwork to say AI CSAM is legal and politicians are using the likeness of their opponents in campaign smears, so I don't feel as optimistic about that but I have to hope you're right. 

[bxr 2,814]

18 minutes ago, Roughhouse Dandy said:

They've already laid the groundwork to say AI CSAM is legal and politicians are using the likeness of their opponents in campaign smears, so I don't feel as optimistic about that but I have to hope you're right. 

Prescient point; just for reference—this thread refresh feels relevant

A federal appeals court has ruled that privately owning AI-generated images of child sexual abuse, made without real child involvement, is protected under the First Amendment if the images stay in your own home. The Seventh Circuit affirmed a lower court's decision to dismiss a possession charge against Steven Anderegg, who used the AI image generator Stable Diffusion to create hundreds of photorealistic images depicting minors in sexual situations. 

Spoiler

Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/judges-rule-ai-child-abuse-161951440.html 

And, again, just for forum-relevant reference … Stable Diffusion is Stability.AI …

Spoiler

Spoiler

AI Isn’t Coming for Hollywood. It's Already Arrived ( Zoë Schiffer via Wired)

Lady Gaga probably wasn’t thinking that a coup would unfold in her greenhouse. Then again, she was cohosting a party there with Sean Parker, the billionaire founder of Napster and first president of Facebook.

It was February 2024, and the singer had invited guests to her $22.5 million oceanside estate in Malibu to mark the launch of a skin-care nonprofit. One of the organization’s trustees was her boyfriend, whose day job was running the Parker Foundation. In the candlelit space, beside floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Pacific, Parker’s people mingled with Gaga’s, nibbling focaccia and branzino alla brace to music from a string quartet (Grammy-winning, of course).

Prem Akkaraju, one of Parker’s close friends and business partners, arrived in a tailored suit, his thick hair coifed to perfection. The two men had known each other since Parker was at Facebook and Akkaraju was in the music industry. Over the years, they’d tried unsuccessfully to launch a movie streaming platform together and—much more successfully—had taken over a renowned visual effects company. Lately they had been talking about starting an AI venture.

That evening at Gaga’s, Akkaraju found himself sitting next to an investor in Stability AI, the company that launched the wildly popular text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion in 2022. Despite its early success, Stability was “circling the drain,” the investor recalls. It was “within days of not having options.” He told Akkaraju: “You should take Stability and make it into the Hollywood-friendly AI model.”

[ … ]

The conversation drifts to rotoscoping. Legato explains that this process, where an artist sketches over a scene frame by frame, used to take hundreds of hours and was reserved for entry-level animators. Now AI can automatically isolate part of an image and add visual effects. “You’d never want your child to work on roto,” he tells me.

The comment is meant to sound optimistic, but it gets to a looming fear about how AI will impact Hollywood. Namely, that the technology will lead to widespread job losses.

“I hear artists at VFX companies say, ‘Hey, I don't want to get replaced.’ Of course you don't want to get replaced!” says Cameron. “If you guys are going to lose your jobs, you're going to lose your jobs over the work drying up versus getting bumped aside by these gen AI models.” The idea, echoed by Akkaraju and Parker, is that as movies become cheaper to produce, more films will get made and overall employment will rise.

When pressed on this point, Akkaraju reverts to an extended metaphor. “Every major transition or technological invention is always met with apprehension at first, and then acceptance, and then it's obvious,” he says. “When ATMs rolled out in the ’80s, all the tellers were really up in arms. They were like, ‘That’s our job. We give withdrawals, we take deposits, and now you’re having this machine do it.’ What’s happened since then is that there are more teller jobs than ever before, and their average pay is higher, even adjusted for inflation.”

Whether the coup that began in Lady Gaga’s greenhouse ultimately saves Stability AI, the AI revolution is here and already transforming Hollywood. That collapsing building, that burning forest, that crowd of people you see when you stream a show or go to the movie theater? One person with a keyboard could’ve made them. The thing about that bank-teller anecdote is that it’s often used by techno-optimists—including Stability AI investor Eric Schmidt. What they don’t mention is that the number of bank tellers peaked around 2015. Since then, it’s been on the decline.

[ Source ]

 

Spoiler

[ Source ]

 

ETA: Source attribution

Edited 3 hours ago by bxr

[MOT 3,640]

It's something we gotta face up to and deal with. My fear is that the rich people are going to face up to it and deal with it by agreeing that the world's population of 8bn is too big by about 7.95bn.

[Emvee 8,857]

The warnings won’t make a difference. Just like climate change, monied interests get what they want anyway. Our government establishment is a slave to capital. They’ll frame it as necessary for national security just like they do with oil. They will politicize the anti-AI movement and turn it into “socialist propaganda.” And with the power that AI will have over social media and the content we are allowed to see, they will be more effective than ever in muddying the water one way or another. 

Edited 45 minutes ago by Emvee

[SavetheEarthNow 250]

All those tech companies pushing AI data centers into our communities are a bunch of demons. We should be protesting each and every single one they want to build. Governments are approving the centers without even letting people know they're being built. We need to raise our voices like people have in some cities in US and Canada and say NO to AI. 

[gagzus 24,671]

1 hour ago, Roughhouse Dandy said:

They've already laid the groundwork to say AI CSAM is legal and politicians are using the likeness of their opponents in campaign smears, so I don't feel as optimistic about that but I have to hope you're right. 

That’s just in the US though, a country where hate speech is (stupidly) protected by the first amendment because nuance has never been applied to the Amendment Rights as time went on. (The right to bare arms for instance, originally existed when guns shot single bullets and not when things like AK47s for instance existed)

It’s absolutely not gonna stand internationally I don’t think. And those are obvious smears; I mean when it becomes something so damaging and not able to be distinguished from real.

Here in the UK for instance, you can still be punished for a lot of the stuff the First Amendment protects in the states. It’s why we made the whole age and access restriction thing happen here with social media before Meta had been forced to do so in the states with a lawsuit (which I believe actually affects it worldwide now). 

 

Edited 1 hour ago by gagzus