Anthropic vs Pentagon

I’ve been asked about the current showdown between Anthropic and the Pentagon.

It is, of course, incredibly dangerous, not because of any existential risk, but because, as Retired General Jack Shanahan says: ”No LLM, anywhere, in its current form, should be considered for use in a fully lethal autonomous weapon system. It’s ludicrous even to suggest it”.

AI is not going to kill us all, but AI can be (and has been) certainly used by one group of humans to victimize another group of humans, whether that takes the form of Intellectual Property Theft, Generation of Non-Consensual Sexualized Images, or because some moron hooked an AI up to a weapon of war.

It is important when these issues arise that we focus on the real problem: AI being used by humans against other humans, and not allow the AI Doomers to change the subject (as they so often attempt) from an urgent problem that needs to be solved to a useless discussion about hypothetical future Science Fiction.