People are getting pretty freaked out about AI, but are they worried about the right things?

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

Last week, Elon Musk, along with more than 1,000 experts in science and technology, signed

an open letter to labs developing advanced artificial intelligence, asking them to pause what

they call the out-of-control race to train ever more powerful systems.

The letter warns these, quote, non-human minds might eventually outsmart us, risking the

loss of control of our civilization.

It's a framing that Mrs. The Mark, according to Emily M. Bender, she's a computational

linguist at the University of Washington, who is skeptical of AI hype.

Which isn't to say she doesn't have concerns about this technology.

She and co-authors lay a number of them out in a 2021 paper called on the dangers of stochastic

parrots.

That's how she describes large language models like chat GPT.

Text is very convincing.

Language is something we associate with other humans.

And when we understand language, what we're doing is imagining the mind behind the language.

And when the text didn't start from a human, but it started from one of these probabilistic

text synthesis machines, we are still going to be prone to imagining a mind that's there

and being fooled into thinking it is understanding, reasoning, having thoughts about the world

when it's not.

Now, one of the dangers you have not listed is the idea that AI will turn evil or put us

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