Amid a string of cyber security related incidents reinforcing public concerns about AI, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei was parodied on Saturday Night Live.
Mr Amodei, who has become one of the most recognisable executive figures of the AI boom, was portrayed by comedian and actress Jane Wickline during the Weekend Update segment.
“I may have been alarming in my recent interviews but I want to assure you that if we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails, we will be able to stop me,” the actor said during the skit.
Michael Che then asked how the general public could be reassured that AI “isn’t going to kill us”.
“Sam Altman and myself, as well as all the major players, we’ve talked about this extensively and we are all on the same page here, we do not condone what we are doing,” Wickline answered.
The parody shows how the concerns about AI have spilt over into everyday discourse.
Most of the concerns in the US about AI revolve around fears of what it might do the labour market as well as the potential environmental impact due to the proliferation of data centres.
In recent months, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Alphabet-owned Google have all acknowledged that their various AI models have somehow escaped their digital testing confines and managed to compromise various aspects of public and private digital infrastructure.
The recent incidents have confirmed the worst fears about AI frequently raised by cyber-security experts, while at the same time bringing forth new worries.
In turn, public polling in the US and in other countries shows increasing concerns.
On Sunday, US Attorney General Todd Blanche was asked about whether or not the US Department of Justice, and for that matter, the administration of President Donald Trump, would start to advocate for more AI guardrails and regulations amid a series of cyber security-related incidents.
“The answer is not to suddenly try to regulate this in a way that puts us in second or third place,” Mr Blanche said during an appearance on ABC’s This Week.
Mr Blanche was referencing the global race for AI dominance, where some speculate that the winner – the US, China or another country – will dominate the world economy.
“We have a tonne of laws, criminal laws, civil laws, that are already in place and on the books that allow us to charge individuals, to charge companies in the right circumstances, when there’s crimes committed,” Mr Blanche said on ABC, stopping short of saying if any AI executives or companies would be charged as a result of recent incidents.
During the UN General Assembly, which ends on Monday, Anthropic’s Mr Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman told world leaders at the UN headquarters that people must be at the centre of making decisions on the technology.
While both executives acknowledged the increasingly apparent security worries, they did not lay out any particularly concrete proposals for regulation.
Within hours of Mr Altman concluding his speech at the UN, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that OpenAI’s technology had compromised a healthcare website in his country.
Mr Albanese did not rule out consequences for OpenAI.
“There will obviously be legal consequences on it,” he said. “It would be entirely inappropriate for me to pre-empt that.”
Regardless of whether OpenAI is held accountable for the Australian hack, any goodwill that Mr Altman gained with his UN speech was blunted because of the announcement.
Meanwhile, even staunch technology proponents like Microsoft co-founder and former chief executive Bill Gates have warned that AI, if not properly regulated, could create a significant chasm in terms of education and healthcare access, and also had the potential to cause massive unemployment.
In an interview show on Sunday on NBC, Mr Gates continued his calls for a global consensus on potential regulatory solutions.
He also said that governments seemed to be unprepared for nefarious individuals or groups making use of various tools.
“Historically, countries had cyber attack teams and they could think of things like bioterror weapons,” Mr Gates told NBC. “Now, small groups with AI can do what only the biggest countries could do, so it’s really the bad intent plus AI that looms as a major threat unless governments insist on various safeguards, you know, we will see a lot of big, negative things because we’re not safeguarding.”
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