Before you share the Netflix documentary “AI Gone Rogue” with family or friends to help them understand why the AI industry freaked out so badly that leaders called for a slowdown, take note: Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO of the AI platform Hugging Face, says the film isn’t accurate. He appears in it because it’s supposed to be about the famed attack on his company by rogue OpenAI agents.
“Super disappointing, as they went for maximum anthropomorphism of the technology and full doomer mode,” Delangue wrote in a post on X. “I spent more than two hours with them trying to correct all their mistakes and ground this in reality, explaining that agents are technological systems, not aliens. But it looks like the drive to scare people for maximum views was too strong.”
Boy, the word “doomer” sure is loved as some putdown. It’s used when people talk about the climate future… “you’re such a doomer”. Yet it keeps changing.
He’s right on the anthropomorphism problem, but that’s human nature. We do it with everything. We should try to avoid it with AI because he’s right, it’s not someone, but just technology. However, him using that as an excuse that it can’t do harm as “just tech systems” goes along with the doomer line. He’s dead wrong about that, it’s doing a lot of harm, AND can have actions that, while not sentiently driven, are not predictable and are perfectly in line with a non-aligned system that we thought would do X, but ended up doing Y, Z and Omega. Partially because we made human mistakes and left doors open, but not solely for that.
This is the opposite of “doomerism”, it’s the dog with the coffee saying it’s fine. Which ought to be a big red flag.
On a long enough timeline, everything is a paperclip.
Maybe the real friends were the paperclips we made along the way.