from Hacker News

Center for AI Safety's new spokesperson suggests „burning down labs"

by MrBuddyCasino on 5/20/25, 7:52 AM with 25 comments

• by brap on 5/20/25, 8:40 AM

  If you’re wondering how qualified this guy is to be making such outrageous claims about AI, his background is that he’s a... journalist

• by flave on 5/20/25, 8:43 AM

  I assume this is a strategy (the man is a marketing/pr strategist) borrowed from certain climate change advocacy groups which is basically to take up the most extreme possible position and hope to “shift the Overtone Window”.

  Personally I think it’s a. Immoral b. Dangerous and c. Self defeating.

  Immoral because deceiving is actually quite bad regardless of your justification.

  Dangerous because you will attract true-believers who are neurotic, mentally ill or misguided and really believe what you’re saying as a strategic thing. You will create a movement that you don’t control and is just wrong about the world.

  Self-defeating partly for the above reasons but mostly because you may discredit your position with the people who understand “just enough” and those people run many major companies, countries etc.

• by KaiserPro on 5/20/25, 8:26 AM

  I mean its not a novel viewpoint.

  But I don't understand what he hopes to achieve. I mean its just going to mean that the development they fear so much being done elsewhere.

  Also I wonder what they think AI is going to do to us?

  Its unlikley that AI is going to kill us, it'll be the civil unrest caused by unemployment.

• by fnands on 5/20/25, 8:25 AM

  It turns out anyone can create a non-profit called the "Center for AI Safety" and then post wild things on twitter.

  Is this news?

• by hengheng on 5/20/25, 8:49 AM

  Ah, so his recommended course of action is to "destroy a pipeline", and he will advocate for doing this and probably write a book called "how to destroy a pipeline" and he will absolutely not destroy a pipeline.

  I've seen this before haven't I.