76% of Americans Think AI Might Kill Us

0:00Today on the AI Breakdown, we're looking at a survey that suggests that Americans are very nervous about AI. Before that on the brief, DARPA has announced a major new AI cybersecurity competition. The AI Breakdown is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Go to breakdown.network for more information about our YouTube, our Discord, and our newsletter. Welcome back to the AI Breakdown Brief, all the AI headline news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with a story that hopefully is reflective of a shift in the phase that we're in, moving from just talking about whether we should be dealing with AI-related issues to actually dealing with AI-related issues.

0:41Yesterday, the White House and DARPA announced a new artificial intelligence cyber challenge, through which they will give out millions of dollars in grants to help teams figure out how to update infrastructure for a new era. The White House writes, the Biden-Harris administration today launched a major two-year competition that will use AI to protect the United States' most important software, such as code that helps run the internet and our critical infrastructure. The AI Cyber Challenge, AIXCC, will challenge competitors across the United States to identify and fix software vulnerabilities using AI.

1:12Led by DARPA, this competition will include collaboration with several top AI companies, including Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, who are lending their expertise and making their cutting-edge technology available for this challenge. The competition, which will feature almost 20 million in prizes, will drive the creation of new technologies to rapidly improve the security of computer code, one of cybersecurity's most pressing challenges. So one of the things that's interesting about this is that they're inviting both teams that can pay for themselves to participate, but they're also making about$7 million in grants available for small businesses who want to participate who otherwise might not be able to.

1:44They have registration for a open track, which doesn't involve that funding, as well as a funded track, which does give companies access to that. All of that kicks off this fall, and then teams spend a year in qualifiers, after which the top 20 teams advance to the semifinals, which happen next August. During the semifinals, the top 20 teams are whittled down to the top five teams, each of who get an additional$2 million, which leads to the finals a year later in August 25, when the winners are announced with first getting$4 million, second getting$3 million, third getting$1.5 million. Now intuitively, I have some amount of skepticism around this sort of funding or competition structure leading to the best results, but that might be just because we're not used to seeing this approach.

2:23Maybe this is actually a really good way to incentivize people to work on these types of issues, rather than whatever they might be doing in their commercial startup anyways, especially to the extent that this program ends up being kind of a feeder into those larger AI labs as well. In other words, it's not a bad way to spend a couple years working on an important problem, getting access to some government money, and showing off your skills to companies that might hire you or your team later. Either way, for me, I am mostly glad to just see actual action happening in this space, and it'll be really interesting to see how this plays out.

2:52Next up today, we have a couple of updates from stories we've covered recently. The first surrounds China and AI chip orders. We've talked a lot recently about how there is increasing pressure on the Biden administration to make even further restrictions on the AI chips that are available to China. Since chip restrictions went into place over the last couple years, NVIDIA started to produce a chip that was lower powered so that it could still be available to the Chinese market. Now, with all the scuttlebutt that the US might clamp down even farther, apparently the big Chinese companies have been placing an absolute flurry of orders for AI chips.

3:22According to sources close to NVIDIA, Baidu, Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba have placed orders worth$1 billion for the rest of 2023 and around$4 billion for 2024. Our next update comes from the big Zoom dust-up. You'll remember that over the weekend, people noticed that a Zoom terms of service update seemed to give Zoom a heck of a lot of access to train their AI on customer data. Now, quite quickly, the noise got to the level where they had to have an official response, adding a line in the terms to make it very clear that users would have to opt in for that data collection to occur. And presumably, they hoped that would be that, but it wasn't.

3:55Now, the Zoom CEO has had to come out and actually mea culpa it and say that it was a mistake. Eric Yuan, Zoom CEO, said in a LinkedIn post, Given that many friends have reached out to me asking about what had happened over the last two days, I want to set the record straight. One, it is my fundamental belief that any company that leverages customer content to train its AI without customer consent will be out of business overnight. Two, given Zoom's value of care and transparency, we would absolutely never train AI models with customers' content without getting their explicit consent. Three, then why did we make a TOS change in March 2023?

4:26We had a process failure internally that we will fix. Period. Let me be crystal clear. For AI, we do not use audio, video, screen share, or chat content for training our AI models without customer explicit consent. Four, many of our users have asked me what Zoom's next steps would be after I shared this post on August 8th. We have two generative AI features on free trial. Even though we have several customers who have opted in to share their content, we haven't used any customer content to train our AI models. After considering all of your feedback, we are committing to all of our customers that we will never use any of their audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communication like poll results, whiteboard, and reactions to train our AI models.

5:03We will change our general terms of service, free trial terms of service, and our product to reflect this decision very soon. So this is a big response. This isn't just a note saying, oops, we messed up. It's Zoom feeling like they are so backed into a corner that even if customers opted in, they didn't feel like they had the trust to any more ask for that consent. You have to think that this is a shot across the bow for AI companies who have just got a sense at this point that there is growing acrimony towards data collection for AI training purposes. Over in the world of TikTok, that platform is trying to make it easier to identify which content is generated by AI.

5:35It is apparently now giving users a simple toggle to let them identify if they used AI in the process of creating their videos. Now, in addition to allowing users to identify that their content is AI-generated, it also warns that they must disclose that AI-generated content or risk having it taken down. Speaking of content and AI, the latest big entertainment company to explore artificial intelligence appears to be Disney. According to Reuters, Disney has created a task force to study AI, and look at how it might be applied across numerous divisions ranging from their parks to movies. Reuters points to 11 current job openings seeking candidates with expertise in AI and machine learning that they note touch, quote, virtually every corner of the company, from Walt Disney Studios to the company's theme parks and engineering group, Walt Disney Imagineering, to Disney-branded television and the advertising team.

6:20Now, interestingly, one source of Reuters said that it was a cost-cutting measure, or rather that they are looking to AI as a way to bring down the cost of production, which have soared in recent years. Again, perhaps reflecting less Disney strategy and more where mainstream media discourse is, every article that has been picked up about this has included the idea that this is for cost-cutting right in the title, even though that's just speculation from one source and isn't necessarily reflected in any of those job titles. Again, I think this has a lot to say about where Americans are in general with AI, perhaps more so than it has to say about Disney itself.

6:53Lastly today, one from the Uh-Oh Files. A grocery chain in New Zealand has tried to do something cool. They tried to create an AI meal planner app that would take the leftovers or random things that a customer had in their fridge and try to come up with creative ideas for recipes that could make better use of those goods so they didn't go to waste. This is a really cool thing in a time when everyone's trying to pinch pennies and cut down their budgets, right? Well, the problem came when people started adding items to their list that were not necessarily food items. One example picked up by The Guardian was a recipe that the AI app dubbed aromatic water mix.

7:26The bot recommended the recipe as, quote, the perfect non-alcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses. Serve chilled and enjoy the refreshing fragrance. Unfortunately, the recipe that it gave would create chlorine gas, the inhaling of which can cause lung damage or even death. Now, of course, the supermarket said that this was just pranksters being bad, and that they were disappointed to see a, quote, small minority have tried to use the tool inappropriately and not for its intended purpose, and that, of course, they would, quote, keep fine-tuning their controls, but we have to remember, whether it's a savvy mealbot or something much more powerful, the one thing that we can count on is people being people and trying to mess with it.

8:03When that leads to ant poison and glue sandwiches, bleach-infused rice surprise, and methanol bliss French toast, there may be a problem. That's going to do it for today's AI Breakdown Brief. If you enjoyed it and you haven't signed up yet for the newsletter, go check it out. You can get it on the AIBreakdown.Beehive.com. that's B-E-E-H-I-I-V, and get all of this type of content in the morning first thing via email. Thanks for listening or watching, and I'll be back soon with the main AI breakdown. Before we get into the main AI breakdown, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, Supermanage.

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9:09And it's completely free. Visit supermanage.ai forward slash breakdown today to start making the most of your one-on-ones. And thanks again to Supermanage for sponsoring the AI Breakdown. Welcome back to the AI Breakdown. Today, we are talking about a new survey that is getting a lot of attention and which appears at first glance to suggest that Americans are extremely worried about AI. So this was first written up in Axios. The piece was called Exclusive Poll, Americans Distrust AI Giants. The piece kicks off. Majorities of American voters from both parties are worried about AI risks and support federal regulation to control those risks, according to new polling by a new AI-focused think tank, the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute shared exclusively with Axios.

9:59And boy, there are some big banner numbers here. The first poll question that Axios shares is how U.S. adults say they feel about growth in artificial intelligence. Mostly excited? Only 7 % of respondents. Somewhat excited? 14%. Totally neutral, 16%. Somewhat concerned, 32%. And mostly concerned, 30%. Nearly a third that are mostly concerned and another third that are somewhat concerned. That was far from it when it comes to interesting numbers from this study, though. Here are some of the highlights according to the organization that sponsored the study. 72 % of voters prefer slowing down the development of AI compared to just 8 % who prefer speeding development up.

10:3862 % of voters are primarily concerned about artificial intelligence. while just 21 % are primarily excited about it. 86 % of voters believe AI could accidentally cause a catastrophic event, and 70 % agree that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other risks like pandemics and nuclear war. 82 % of voters don't trust tech executives to regulate AI, while voters support a federal agency regulating AI by a more than 3-to-1 margin, including 2-to-1 among Republicans. 76 % of voters believe artificial intelligence could eventually pose a threat to the existence of the human race, including 75 % of Democrats and 78 % of Republicans.

11:16Now, Daniel Coulson, the executive director of this new Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute, wrote, The data is clear. Americans are wary about the next stages of AI and want policymakers to step in to develop it responsibly. At a time when nearly every issue is polarized, there's a broad consensus among Americans that policymakers need to decide what path AI development should take. So before we discuss these poll results even further, let's talk about the organization that sponsored this survey. The AI Policy Institute's webpage says, translating public concern into policy. American voters are worried about risks from AI technology.

11:50The AI Policy Institute's mission is to channel public concern into effective regulation. We engage with policymakers, media, and the public to shape a future where AI is developed responsibly and transparently. Now, as you can see, the perspective of the AI Policy Institute is very clear. They are not a neutral institution, and don't pretend to be. They are a body that exists because they are concerned about AI, because they believe that others are also concerned about AI, and because they want that to turn into actual effective regulation. Now, a little bit down their homepage, there is a section called Slow Deliberate Progress.

12:23That phrase, I think, from the little that I've read on this website, seems to sum up what the goal is here. In other words, it doesn't appear to me to be some neo-Luddite organization that doesn't want any advancement in artificial intelligence. Its concern appears to be around the financial incentive and the market competition around AI more than anything else. The AI frontier, they write, is being pushed forward rapidly by corporations pouring billions into training powerful AI models. The speed of this advancement has outpaced our understanding of these systems, leaving us in the dark about their capabilities, behavior, and the risks they pose.

12:56The AIPI points out that the leaders of all of the big labs have signed that letter saying that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority. And they even hint at what they see as perhaps the most significant first moves that the government could make. They write, by regulating the data centers necessary for developing cutting-edge AI models, and by mandating the demonstration of an AI model safety prior to its deployment, government has the opportunity to significantly mitigate approaching threats. So that's who this poll is coming from. Now, of course, it wasn't the AIPI who was out doing the polling.

13:28That was done by YouGov, who does tons and tons of polls across a million different topics, and are broadly speaking considered good at what they do and not likely to nudge results in one direction just to confirm the priors of whoever's sponsoring the survey they're doing. On the website, they shared a set of the actual questions rather than just the summarized results. And the only one that felt at all leading to me was this one. Agree or disagree. Tech company executives can't be trusted to self-regulate the AI industry. That could have just as easily have been written, agree or disagree. Tech company executives can be trusted to self-regulate the AI industry, but by putting the emphasis on the can't, it kind of nudges the respondent to be in the mindset of skeptical in the first place.

14:09Still, I share those things only so that you have an appropriate grain of salt and treat this survey for what it is, which is one data point. Now, broadly speaking, and you've probably heard me say this on the show before, I agree pretty wholeheartedly with the idea that broadly speaking, Americans have a sense and have grokked the message of the AI safety folks. In fact, at some points, I talked about how I think that community needs to focus a little bit more on solutions, because there's sort of been this head-spinning shift where the issue went from off-the-radar entirely to something that people were really concerned about.

14:41Now, why might that be? What might explain why Americans are inclined to be nervous about this? I think there are a few aspects of it. One has to do with how not theoretical this is. And what I mean by that is that usually when you have a big technology hype cycle, it's a small cohort of early adopters who are really enfranchised and actually doing the thing in question. Not so with generative AI, where hundreds and hundreds of millions, if not billions of people have actually used these tools and do actually use these tools now day in and day out. The experience of going from not really thinking about AI at all, and maybe only having a sci-fi understanding of what that word or term even meant, and then having ChachiBT do your homework for you better than you can, or write those emails for work better than you can, or teach you about things that you want to learn about better than any other resource that you can find, is the sort of zero to one moment that really makes people question everything they think they know about the world around them.

15:40Now, I don't think that's necessarily a priori, good or bad, but what I think people got from those first experiences with ChatGPT was a sense of the significance of this change. No disrespect to NFTs or any other crypto thing, but it was unignorable for most people who actually use these tools in a way that most technology hype cycles that came before them just weren't. So that's factor one. To sum up, Americans were primed to think that this was a real and significant thing. Now, second, that came into the context of waning and frankly fast declining trust in big tech firms. If you go back and look at polls from the early teens, tech companies were still seen as the new kids on the block, much more trustworthy, for example, than big financial institutions.

16:24The global financial crisis was still fresh in people's minds, and these cute new social apps were still just fun, kind of insignificant things. Now, the more and more of our lives that have been consumed by those big tech platforms, the more and more trust has gone down. And frankly, people of different political persuasions have found lots of different reasons to dislike big tech equally, if oppositely. Brookings published a study summarizing longitudinal polls from American institutional confidence polls. They looked at the loss in confidence of different institutions between 2018 and 2021.

16:55Now, it's worth noting that in that period, institutions of all stripes lost confidence, which I think will resonate with many people's anecdotal or lived experience. But by a fairly significant margin, the institutions that lost the most confidence in that three-year period included Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Just after that were colleges, which had lived through the admissions scandal, press, which was being completely barraged by the then-sitting president. And after that, major companies, FBI, military, political parties, organized labor, organized religion, courts, state government, nonprofits, local government, banks, executive branch, local police, and Congress.

17:30Somehow Congress had the lowest amount of loss in confidence, but my guess is that has more to do with how low its starting point was, rather than it just being more durable than these other institutions. In any case, the point is, ChatGPT and all of these generative AI tools happened at a time when we were primed to not trust big tech, to not trust the CEOs of Google and Microsoft, to stare squintily at Sam Altman and ask whether he's just another Sam. So you now have, one, the significance that comes from actually experiencing these tools, two, the priming of the populace to dislike and distrust big tech, and then three, for the last three months, we have had basically a never-ending barrage of mainstream media coverage of extinction risk.

18:13This was jump-started, of course, by Jeffrey Hinton leaving Google and going on his media tour about his concerns. But for a while there, every day there was another headline about the idea that AI might kill us all. So that's a third factor. A fourth and final factor is that people are concerned even if AI doesn't kill us all, it might take our jobs. Now, this perspective has gotten louder because of AI's central place in the Hollywood strikes happening right now. But it's also just a perpetuation and an amplification of a trend in some cases of automation taking away jobs that has been happening for decades, combined with the fact that this is the first time that white-collar jobs have been threatened.

18:53And you have this really palpable stew of reasons why people are going to be scared, why they have reasons to mistrust big tech, and why they understand that whatever happens, something big is going to happen. The question really comes down to what is Congress going to do with this broad bipartisan support? What type of rules and regulations are actually going to make sense and serve to address these concerns while also not just reactionarily shutting down a field of technological innovation that could also come with huge benefits? I will say my general bias is to not be super optimistic about Congress's ability to get that right.

19:29But I will also say that there seems to be some pretty serious good faith efforts to get up to speed very quickly that could really bear fruit. The most hopeful thing might be that the fact that this is such a clear popular issue among Americans gives representatives of both party the cloud cover to actually try to get it right. Is that being too optimistic? We will just have to wait and see. But anyways, that is the story with this poll that you are likely hearing about right now. If you haven't yet seen them, go to the AIPI.org. Check out this new organization. See if you think it's interesting or if what they have to say makes you skeptical.

20:04do your own research, come to your own conclusions, and then come back and let's chat about it. That's going to do it for today's AI Breakdown. Thanks as always for listening or watching. And until next time, peace.