Bizarrely-Coiffed AI Expert Delivers Doomsday Forecast on CNN: ‘Be Really, Really, Really Scared!’

A wild-haired documentary maker gave a lengthy interview on CNN Thursday on the dangers of artificial intelligence — urging people to be “really, really scared.”

Speaking with CNN’s Brianna Keilar on CNN News Central, Daniel Roher talked about his film The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, and said that while he’s optimistic about the potential for AI he was cautious as well.

Keilar described recent frightening incidents involving rogue AI before asking Roher if experts were “confident that there is a way to not have AI be so manipulative.” He added:

No. And that’s the problem. This is what’s really, really frightening about this is, and I cannot stress this enough, the men and women who are building and designing and rolling this technology out into the world don’t know how it works.

There is not a hood that we can look under and have a comprehensive and developed understanding of what this thing is doing, how it operates, how it thinks. It’s kind of a black box.

It’s this sort of scary esoteric process. And we haven’t put in the time and resources to study, to figure out exactly how it’s working. And that is the challenge of this, the circumstance that you just outlined that is invoked in my documentary.

It seems quaint now. It seems like a cute little story from two years ago in the face of what we’ve seen, the disclosures of the last couple of weeks, the Hugging Face hack and the news that broke just this morning.

So everyone needs to be really, really, really scared about what this is and really, really, really motivated to try and get this right because the potential of the technology is phenomenal.

Roher said he was “excited” about the “positive benefits” of AI but then immediately mentioned “the dystopian nightmare scenarios that are increasingly, increasingly present.”

He also acknowledged that he sounds “like I’m a crazy and frightened and scared. But at the end of the day, I just think we have such an opportunity to make the world a better place with this technology. If we get it right. But that’s a big if. And everyone should be be paying attention to that question.”

The interview came days after AI CEOs such as Anthropic boss Dario Amodei warned “we must slow down the pace” of AI, just days after an Anthropic researcher quit and predicted the tech could “kill us all” within a decade.

In a lengthy statement posted online Saturday, Amodei laid out steps to slow down the pace of AI advancements and acknowledged some serious risks, including rogue AI agents “taking over the entire internet” in six to 12 months.

Other tech bosses, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, agreed with Amodei’s take.

Watch above via CNN.

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