Blaze News investigates: Brain downloads, self-driving cars, and autonomous beings: Is the media lying about the dangers of AI?

Industry experts and entrepreneurs alike think that artificial intelligence needs to be harnessed before it's too late.

Of course, any push toward widening the use of technology that would benefit a person or particular company's bottom line would likely be welcomed. At the same time, however, there is an overarching narrative that AI is on the brink of becoming incredibly dangerous.

The theme has existed for some time, though. It was all the way back in 1991 when "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" taught humanity that entrusting our weapons systems to AI would be a big mistake. Other films like 2008's "Eagle Eye" showed a central AI could track people anywhere they went and ruin their life, controlling systems of society at its whim.

Fast forward to the present day, and it has seemed like every person in the know has warned about the dangers that artificial intelligence can bring.

Microsoft said in February 2024 that American enemies are preparing for AI-driven cyber attacks. Multiple former Google employees claimed AI at the company had become sentient and learned to feel, comparing it to "creating God."

Elon Musk even said AI is a "threat to humanity."

What do all of these sources have in common? Each is the owner or developer of his own artificial intelligence platform. Just days after his comments, Musk announced Grok, the AI technology that is integrated into his X platform.

Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI, while Google has its aptly named Google AI under its belt. This begs the question as to whether these corporate talking points are simply acts of deceptive marketing and misdirection or if the experts in the field have a true worry about the path unfettered AI can go down.

'AI is like water in the sea, you can not like it, but if it goes against you, you will drown.'

Blaze News spoke with industry experts and AI entrepreneurs to find out whether or not the general consumer should be concerned with the direction companies are taking with their automated services.

Most didn't buy into the idea of an immediate threat stemming from artificial sources, offering stark differences in their answers compared to that of the big players. But what was stressed was the need for Western nations to harness and monetize AI before adversarial economies do it first.

"There are significant long-term dangers, but the risks of not utilizing AI now potentially exacerbates those long-term risks," said Christopher Fakouri, who represented the Czech Republic on the matter.

"If we don't utilize and develop now, we will lose out in the long term to other markets and other people ... a lot of countries and jurisdictions across the world are looking for market capture [with AI]; however, I would not underestimate those risks."

Whether this proposed arms race was strictly economic or also militaristic was not clear.

"[AI] functions on the human layer and helps augment excellence; the earlier we're ready to grasp the tools of augmented reality the earlier we can use these tools to benefit us," said Dr. Adejobi Adeloye from Amba Transfer, a company that uses AI technology to help seniors acquire medication.

"It is the future of the economy. Right now we are looking towards the era of artificial intelligence, of augmented reality, and virtual reality, and infusing it into education, manufacturing, and mining," the doctor added.

Return's Peter Gietl sees AI disrupting the marketplace in the near future but not in a doomsday sense that many are speculating.

"This means SEO, paralegal jobs ... but overall I don't see it as overwhelmingly replacing a mass amount of the job market," he said.

What is AI currently capable of?

Nuclear launches at the hands of AI wouldn't be completely out of the question based on the current rhetoric around the topic. But behind closed doors, the technology may not be nearly as far along as the public thinks.

Multiple representatives from IBM revealed that the technology isn't exactly ready for world domination. One spokesperson revealed that the company isn't necessarily interested in selling products that use AI and is currently focused on harnessing the technology for use in sports. IBM has partnered with both Wimbledon and the Masters, sharing its technology to track data to increase the user experience.

Fans can have AI detail up-to-date action from the events and even have it read to them as if it were play-by-play announcing.

"We're not hiding it or trying to make it seem like it's a real person," one representative who wanted to remain anonymous said. "We have voice actors who lend their voices to the technology." The spokesperson added that the most popular voice for golf has been a generic male from the American South.

That technology is called IBM watsonx.

The scary rhetoric isn't close to where AI technology currently is either, the representative explained.

"It's nonsense," the IBM employee said. "An AI model was able to correctly identify four colors recently, and that was considered a huge breakthrough."

While it is possible that the information was carefully crafted between the people at IBM with the intention to mislead, the representative could also be simply telling it like it is.

Gietl agreed, explaining that AI in its current state is still producing grave errors.

"There's a term called 'AI Hallucination.' AI will make things up that it thinks the user wants to hear. All of the programs are being trained and taught on human knowledge that exists online, which of course includes a mass amount of non sequiturs and misinformation."

"A lot of rhetoric is scare tactic propaganda put out by major companies to scare everyone into thinking AI is much more advanced than it is at the moment, and presents existential danger to the economy and national defense," Gietl continued. "By doing that they can scare people into accepting regulatory capture — these companies want to capture the market and regulate it."

'Eventually we will become a society of empowered, independent, AIs.'

The other side of the coin is indeed bleak and does include the aforementioned spooky rhetoric.

Dr. Adeloye likened those who may be looking at job loss as needing to take note of when "the cheese" has moved.

"Certain things are inevitable if you're not ready to understand that the cheese has moved, and you need to move and find new cheese. The handwriting is on the wall ... your professional job may be on the line."

Rat maze comparisons pale to what Olga Grass explained, a representative from forward-thinking company AISynt.

The company, which Grass said was based on the research of a "scientist who formerly worked for the Soviet Union," is working in the direction of developing autonomous AI beings.

"We don't have the real AI just yet. Real intelligence is not computational, it's not algorithm-based," Grass said. "The real AI is a digital nervous system that learns for itself, and has the ability to build from the environment."

The representative went on to liken the company's technology to raising a child or training a dog — learning from its environment. AISynt can certainly be described as ambitious but also frightening.

While Grass sold the technology as a personal AI system that "empowers" and protects from other AI systems, the company's website is much more Matrix-esque.

The technology promises brain downloads, instant learning, and living/learning beings.

"Living, digital, evolving forms of any nervous system," Grass said. She then claimed that the technology was already in use with a "neural matrix" in the form of an autonomous drone that thinks and learns for itself.

Imminent job loss

AI is a field that is on fire, and, as such, the term is being used colloquially as a buzz word to sell almost anything. Blaze News was able to chat with representatives from customer service, job-posting software, social media aggregation, and everywhere else in between. Each genre promised unique and first-to-market opportunities with AI.

Companies are using the verbiage to "race for venture capital money and startup funds," Gietl explained. "Even the kooks and crazy people."

Oleh Redko, CEO at Business!Go, said governments need to make a strategy sooner rather than later to prevent massive job losses.

"AI is like water in the sea, you can not like it, but if it goes against you, you will drown. Many people are against AI and some people are for AI, but we need to accept it and manage it and try to make it safe."

The entrepreneur stressed that governments don't have the right to come after companies after the fact with taxation and regulation simply because they didn't have the foresight to prepare for the technological advancements. He predicted job market changes are five to 10 years away.

On the other hand, AISynt has an outlook that is completely different from all the other representatives in the AI marketplace:

"Eventually we will become a society of empowered, independent, AIs."

Move over, Bruce Willis.

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