this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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I agree insofar as AI companies and individuals should be held responsible for the actions their agents take. But it's dangerous to frame this as just another "bad guys with guns" type scenario where there is no problem if you're a responsible user.
The people who have created this technology don't understand everything about it or even how it works because they have prioritised rapid advancement over all else in an attempt to "win" the race. It is a fundamentally dangerous and unreliable technology that needs to be put on ice until we have developed a clear framework that addresses all the real and current harms and prepares us for a future where it is embedded in daily life.
It doesn't matter if AI is actually conscious or turns into Skynet. None of that is required for significant harms or even existential-level risk. The mainstream conversation really needs to move on from these binary, hyperbolic positions and start focusing on what is actually happening right now.
Seriously, this stupid fucking semantics game from people who know jack shit about the history or structure of the field while society is crumbling around us is infuriating. The term was created early in the life of the field in 1956 and was quickly widely adopted. AI as a field exists to study tasks that computers can do that would typically be considered in the domain of humans or other living beings, i.e. requiring intelligence (or thought at the time to require intelligence, if that's your juice); the term wasn't created to trick people.
That's why when you play a game and do a frustrating escort quest because the character you're escorting behaves like someone with severe brain damage, "the AI sucks". Not because you think there is (or is supposed to be) conscious superintelligence inside Bilbip Flipflop who's supposed to be following you to the next checkpoint according to a bunch of conditionals executing on your 2004 IBM, but because that coordinated act of reacting to the world around them is supposed to be emulating what a real person would do given that role.
If you want to piss around philosophizing about about the nebulous nature of the word intelligence and how much that translates to some concept of "true", conscious understanding versus simply interpreting external data to adapt and achieve tasks, then live your best life.
But in broader discourse, it's clearly a meaningless distraction when society and the world it exists in are fucking on fire. Like anyone is going to see someone poorly arguing Philosophy 101 shit online nitpicking one of the most complex, widely covered, rapidly evolving topics on Earth and suddenly "wake up" about it like:
Very true. Unfortunately, the discourse is being shit up by some of the most ignorant and, frankly, stupid people in our society whose only real goal here is to make themselves feel smart on social media. Not everyone needs to be an expert on AI, I'm certainly not, but we should all at least be making an effort to read and learn about what is actually happening in reality before jumping in with some vitriolic one-liner or hot take designed to go viral and get attention. It has become a binary, us vs them political/ideological debate like any other and that is significantly impairing humanity's broader understanding of the real problems and slowing our response to them.
Later on what will really bake your noodle is thinking about how many comments on social media are bot generated. Depending on where you look, it's almost 60% (if not more)
"It'S jUsT sPiCy AuTo CoRrEcT" is the calling card of someone who has very little understanding of the technology.