GuShiio.com Article source: AI Frontline
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Recently, according to foreign media reports, a group of activists gathered in San Francisco, USA, on Saturday to form a non-violent civil resistance organization called “Stop AI”, aiming to prevent the further development of artificial intelligence, especially for General Artificial Intelligence (AGI). OpenAI defines AGI as a highly autonomous system that transcends humans in most economically valuable jobs, but the organization believes it has huge impact and dangerous and wants to ban it completely.
Stop AI announced a series of goals on its website, including requiring the government to force artificial intelligence companies to shut down all work related to the creation of general artificial intelligence models,Destroy existing models and permanently ban their development。However, they are not banning all artificial intelligence, but only targeting those parts that threaten human survival.
Targeting OpenAI
In terms of specific action strategies, Stop AI mainly expands its influence by organizing protests. For example, they recently began to “siege” OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco to protest. Previously, the organization has held multiple protests in OpenAI offices and elsewhere. Among them, two co-founders Sam Kirchner and Guido Reichstadter were arrested for blocking OpenAI’s entrance in October last year.
Stop AI member Finn van der Velde, a security advocate and activist with a background in computer science and artificial intelligence technology, said that to prevent the emergence of AGI, an international treaty may be needed, and countries jointly agree not to develop AGI.This means disbanding companies like OpenAI that aim to develop AGI, and at the same time supervise computing capabilities to prevent anyone from training AGI models.
During the protests, there were also calls for a further investigation into the death of Sunchir Balaji, a former OpenAI employee and infringement whistleblower.
In November 2024, Balaji was found dead in his apartment in San Francisco. But Balaji’s parents said they did not believe their son committed suicide and they hoped that external agencies would investigate his son’s death.
The parents of 26-year-old Balaji said they still have doubts about the cause of their son’s death. They said Balaji was found dead on November 26 in his San Francisco apartment with signs of suspected gunshot wounds. San Francisco police said it appeared to be a suicide and no evidence of murder was found during a preliminary investigation. However, his mother said something was wrong in his apartment.
“The password drive is missing. His computer is broken. His desktop computer has been open for three days. Everything was a mess,”Balaji’s mother, Poornima Ramarao, said.
Balaji started working as an OpenAI researcher in 2020. After resigning,He publicly claimed that the company violated copyright laws when developing ChatGPT。His parents said that four days before his death, he was called to testify in a case against OpenAI.
Stop AI believes that Balaji’s death may not have been suicide but was killed, and the reason for the murder was to prevent him from telling the truth about ChatGPT copyright issues.
Stop AI mentioned moral concerns about the artificial intelligence giant’s pursuit of creating “super intelligence.”
Who is Stop AI? What are you doing?
Stop AI, led by co-founders Sam Kirchner and Guido Reichstadter, has already staged protests outside OpenAI’s offices. On Saturday afternoon local time, Stop AI held a demonstration outside technology company OpenAI, which they feared could lead to “human extinction.” They set a bold goal,Hope to gain the support of 3.5% of the U.S. population (or 11 million people)。
Members of Stop AI come from computer, mechanical and mathematical fields.
Founding member Sam Kirchner has a background in mechanical and electrical engineering, while Reichstadter worked as a jeweler for 20 years and earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics. Other team members also have some technical background: Finn van der Velde has a bachelor’s degree in computer science, specifically in artificial intelligence, and left the master’s program in artificial intelligence at the University of Radeburgh “to work in artificial intelligence security,” as his LinkedIn profile shows. Derek Allen can program. Kirchner said Dennis, a part-time team member, is currently pursuing a master’s degree in artificial intelligence.
Stop AI’s Sam Kirchner (left) and Guido Reichstadter at Silverstone Cafe
They firmly believe that human thinking should always be at the forefront of the field of intelligence.
Stop AI launched protests and civil resistance to let the public understand that although San Francisco-based artificial intelligence technology companies admit that general artificial intelligence risks human extinction, they are still advancing related research and development. Some experts even predict that general artificial intelligence may come out this year. They emphasized that artificial intelligence is extremely dangerous. The so-called artificial intelligence safety is just an illusion and cannot be proved through experiments that it will not produce ideas that harm humans. This is similar to the situation where humans once caused the extinction of other species. Also,General artificial intelligence could also cause permanent damage to democratic institutions, while simultaneously leading to mass unemployment, leaving many people without goals in life.。
There are different views in the industry on the development of artificial intelligence. Some people engaged in artificial intelligence believe that the development of general artificial intelligence/super artificial intelligence (AGI/ASI) can help solve problems such as cancer treatment and climate change. But Stop AI counters that it is meaningless to carry out such research and development without ensuring that it is always safe and will not endanger human survival. After all, it is impossible to prove its safety from an experimental perspective.
At present, there is constant controversy over the research and development and restrictions of general artificial intelligence, and its future direction has attracted much attention from all walks of life.
It is worth mentioning that as of now, Stop AI has raised US$6685 in funding.
AI development leads to controversy: Expectation and fear coexist
“… we are trying to permanently ban the development of General Artificial Intelligence (AGI),” Kirchner said in an interview with The Register. “Roughly speaking, AGI refers to a system that is more powerful than all human experts in all areas of technology.”
Geoffrey Hinton, the great AI god, once predicted that there is about 50% chance that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence in the next 20 years. Like other opponents of artificial intelligence, Kirchner fears that humans will lose control.
Kirchner’s concerns about the development of artificial intelligence are not unique. Long before the explosion of the big language model, Elon Musk mentioned in 2014 that using AI is like “summoning” the devil…
In 2014, Musk said in a public event about the development of artificial intelligence: “I think we should be very cautious about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess what our biggest survival threat is, it would probably be this (AI).”
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, people’s views on its potential impact have shown a polarized trend, with both deep concerns and recognition of its positive role. Many people think that consciousness is an extremely complex and unique phenomenon that is difficult for artificial intelligence to reach. It is essentially just a machine for statistical calculations. It lacks feelings, emotions and understanding capabilities. All behaviors are performed according to procedures, which is completely different from humans having free will. Although there is ongoing debate about the “security” of artificial intelligence, many people are still confused about the specific scope of its security.
Currently, people’s concerns about artificial intelligence are mainly concentrated in two aspects.First, artificial intelligence’s ability to generate fake content may cause serious harm。In the political field, false information is already rampant, and the intervention of artificial intelligence may make the situation worse, which in turn may lead to legal problems. For example, innocent people are mistakenly accused of committing crimes, but guilty people use this to obtain alibis; in the financial and economic field, it may also cause problems such as fraud and extortion. Moreover, there are many ways in which artificial intelligence can potentially harm society, many of which remain to be discovered.
Second, artificial intelligence may lead to mass unemployment。Take the Hollywood writers strike as an example. Writers worry that they will be replaced by AI-generated scripts, especially when their past works are used to train AI engines. Similarly, artists are worried that AI-generated images and music will replace their creations. In addition, routine tasks such as sports event summaries will almost certainly be taken over by artificial intelligence.
However, artificial intelligence has also shown huge positive potential. In the medical field, artificial intelligence can help doctors diagnose diseases more accurately, predict the development trend of diseases, and even assist in the development of new drugs by analyzing massive medical data. For example, some artificial intelligence systems can quickly identify abnormalities in medical images, improve early diagnosis rates of diseases such as cancer, and gain valuable treatment time for patients.
In the field of transportation, autonomous driving technology, as one of the important applications of artificial intelligence, is expected to greatly improve traffic safety and efficiency. Through sensors and algorithms, autonomous vehicles can sense the surrounding environment in real time, make faster and accurate driving decisions, and reduce traffic accidents caused by human error. At the same time, intelligent transportation systems can also optimize traffic flow, alleviate congestion, and reduce energy consumption.
At a time when artificial intelligence technology continues to innovate, how to balance its development with potential risks has become an important issue that the whole society needs to consider urgently.
Reference link:
https://x.com/liron/status/1803435675527815302? t=GM7jv516WqvRAA_q4vEBzQ&s=19
https://www.ktvu.com/news/parents-openai-whistleblower-want-outside-investigation-sons-death
https://www.ktvu.com/news/parents-openai-whistleblower-want-outside-investigation-sons-death
