AI Future Worrisome

Two AI stories struck me recently.  The first regards filmmaker James Cameron, who sits on the board of StabilityAI.  Its latest funding round included:

Greycroft, Coatue Management, Sound Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sean Parker, Eric Schmidt and Prem Akkaraju

Cameron recently shared his concerns about artificial general intelligence (AGI)

"It will emerge from one of the tech giants currently funding this multibillion-dollar research," he said.

Those billions are not being spent on acquiring intellectual property rights, trademarks or copyrights.  Big tech is usurping those in China like fashion.  Eric Schmidt spoke to Stanford students about the AI intellectual property grab.

“What you would do if you were a Silicon Valley entrepreneur…is if it took off, then you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up”…”if nobody uses your product it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content and do not quote me”

And this guy has the ears of elected officials.  Schmidt's a recent investor in Stability AI.

One year ago FBI Director Chris Wray spoke of the threat from China, but neglected BigTech's usurping of intellectual property.

"We worry about AI as an amplifier for all sorts of misconduct," Wray said, accusing China of stealing more personal and corporate data than any other nation by orders of magnitude. 

"If you think about what AI can do to help leverage that data to take what's already the largest hacking program in the world by a country mile, and make it that much more effective - that's what we're worried about," he said.

Cameron added to his concerns about AGI:

"Then you'll be living in a world that you didn't agree to, didn't vote for, that you are co-inhabiting with a super-intelligent alien species that answers to the goals and rules of a corporation," Cameron said. "An entity which has access to the comms, beliefs, everything you ever said, and the whereabouts of every person in the country via your personal data."

Cameron said surveillance capitalism, where corporations collect consumer data and sell it for profit, can "toggle pretty quickly" into digital totalitarianism. 

"At best, these tech giants become the self-appointed arbiters of human good, which is the fox guarding the hen house," he said.

The second story addressed AI transcription of medical encounters and its frequent generation of fictional content.  I have enough trouble seeing past problems listed as current diagnoses so the hospital can be paid at a higher rate for a more complex patient.  During my last primary care visit my doctor showed me an AI generated summary for our interaction.  It looked fine and the doctor seemed happy with the summary.  

I saw enough "garbage in -garbage out" in electronic health records to not have confidence in AI.  People with human level intelligence gamed portions of the record for time saving and other reasons.  

I worry the Eric Schmidts of the world won't follow ethical norms, like not stealing or not harming patients, and "just hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up."  

Many members of Congress are lawyers and increasingly, more are PEUs (above scrutiny).  In other words, the people who should be protecting us, won't.

Update: Schmidt is at Crown Prince bin Salman's Future Investment Initiative where he said:

“If you’re a roboticist, the fastest path to robots is in fact drone warfare, I’m sorry to say,” Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and proponent of AI-heavy fighting, said at FII today in Riyadh.

Source:  Semafor Business 

Update 3-21-25:  The Atlantic ran a story on Meta stealing copyrighted books to train its AI.

Update 7-9-25:  Daily Beast reported that Elon Musk's Grok AI praised Hitler as the solution to anti-white hate.  And that's from the improved Grok.

Update 9-27-25:   Corporate use of AI coined a new term "workslop" for shoddy output that needs to be reworked by knowledgeable, experienced staff.  Studies show AI to be a time-eater for human workers. 

CNN reported on the Harvard Business School study:

...epidemic of nonsensical AI-generated work that “masquerades as productivity” and “lacks real substance.”

That's no surprise, given how work software systems became overly complex, cumbersome and added to the time it took to do one's job.  Add their unreliability and the time spent dealing with corporate IT and "tech" has become a nightmare for many workers.  

Layer AI's workslop on top amid C-suite micromanagement, supported by strategic human resources, and the workplace becomes a special hell.

Workslop is the inevitable (and avoidable) result of companies blindly adopting tools that don’t work simply because a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires declared that chatbots were The Next Internet while they were at the same time building literal bunkers for the End Times.