Episode 200: From rogue AI agents to factchecking AI, Ken Ford responds to more listener AI questions

Episode 200: From rogue AI agents to factchecking AI, Ken Ford responds to more listener AI questions

In today’s third of a three-part series of Ask Me Anything episodes, Dr. Ken Ford responds to more listener questions and concerns about artificial intelligence. In AMA episode 198, Ken answered a wide-range of questions about chatbots and data centers and the future of AI, which prompted a new round of listener questions about AI that Ken will be answering today.

Ken has been working in AI since the 1980s and is well-positioned to help listeners sort genuine advances in AI from exaggerated claims. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence elected Ford a Fellow in 2000 for his “leadership in exploring and explaining foundational issues and in establishing large-scale AI research programs and institutions.”

In today’s episode, Ken tackles listener questions about:

— A team leader at Anthropic, the developer of the chatbot Claude, who shared a post that someday “AI could kill all humans.”

— the Hugging Face incident in July where OpenAI’s AI agents, operating in a testing environment, broke out, got online, and compromised parts of Hugging Face’s systems.

— How to factcheck AI systems that confabulate nonexistent facts.

— And that’s just for starters.

If you have questions for Ken and Dawn after listening to today’s episode, or any episode of STEM-Talk, email your questions to STEM-Talk producer Randy Hammer at rhammer@ihmc.org.

Show notes:

[00:04:55] Dawn opens the AMA with a listener question about Evan Hubinger, a team lead at Anthropic who shared his thoughts in a post that someday “AI could kill all humans.” Anthropic is the developer of the chatbot Claude. Hubinger went on to say in his post, which has been viewed tens of millions of times, that he believes there’s more than a 10 percent chance that AI could wipe out humanity within the next decade. The listener asks if we should indeed be terrified that AI is going to one day kill all humans.

[00:14:19] A listener asks Ken if he were appointed AI Czar, with broad powers to create and implement regulation of AI, what would he do? The listeners also adds that declining this burden is not one of Ken’s options for an answer.