The point of the AI doomsday warning is that we are at a point where we still can think about those problems. Fast forward a couple of years and AI will be integrated as deeply into our society as electricity. There no longer will be an option to just switch it off when everything we use depends on it.

Anyway, that aside, I feel the whole scaremongering about bots and propaganda is a bit misguided. Yes, those are real issues that can and will happen. But it’s neither AIs fault nor can it be brought under control by regulating AI. To fix that we have to uplift our journalistic standards by like a lot. At the moment nobody even tries to provide useful information, nobody tells you their sources, nobody tells you GPS coordinates or the time when something happens, nobody even provides plain old links, it’s all just “hearsay” and “trust me bro”.

Just a few days ago the worlds mainstream press was reporting how Israel bombed a hospital and killed 500 people, all while the hospital was still standing with no bomb crater in sight. Some article even included stock photography of other completely unrelated bombings in the past. The whole event was trivial for everybody to verify, yet nobody did. Worse yet, some even doubled down on their initial misreporting days later (e.g. Channel4).

So yeah, with mainstream journalists being less trustworthy than random guy on Twitter, we do have a problem. But that problem is not with AI. If anything, I hope that AI can help us out of this misery by automating the fact checking and sourcing of information. At the moment even seemingly basic task like “where did this photo came from?” require far to much manual work.