this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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I don't understand why Bill Gates still feels the need to do marketing work, he is already rich he doesn't need to do commercials and blatantingly shill for a product for money like this.

Also the ides that anyone should listen to Bill Gates about needing or not needing government regulation, nationalization or trustbusting is actually insane.

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[–] fubarx@lemmy.world 5 points 6 hours ago

The only way 'AI' can kill people is if it's connected to a killing machine, or more likely, it drives people who run killing machines. In all cases, it involves negligient, evil, or incompetent human beings.

All of this is avoidable.

[–] yesman@lemmy.world 37 points 18 hours ago (9 children)

Is it just me or does this "AI Doomsday" talk seem like coordinated messaging?

Chatbots that are smart enough to destroy humanity would be really impressive, right? "Powerful enough to change the world" and "powerful enough to destroy the world" are similar claims and maybe they're switching to the second one because nobody is buying the first anymore.

[–] JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Gotta get that investment cash somehow, why not skynet?

[–] Delphia@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago

The big organisations want it regulated to the point where upstarts get strangled by oversight and regulations and only the biggest established players will have the manpower and money to ensure compliance.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 17 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

it's not just you

occam's razor says that in the face of faltering demand and sky-high expenditures, government cheese and regulation is an expected pivot

try to suggest that and the rats get very mad tho

[–] ladicius@lemmy.world 10 points 17 hours ago

They want to shift responsibilities to their products and their users.

@yesman @supersquirrel this has been one of the core critihype topics all along. It just gets more or less emphasis over time and I think they're intentionally cycling through them.
This was all established in the "Effective Altruist" scene that's at the root of this stuff well before they latched onto LLMs as the fake AI technology to use for the scam.

[–] StevenSavage@sfba.social 4 points 18 hours ago

@yesman @supersquirrel its an op. Just another promo.

[–] Yolfen@chitter.xyz 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

@cstross @supersquirrel @yesman But who's buying the latter? Those already willing and able to destroy are already stoking the AI money furnace. What do the rest of us get out of consenting to stoke it, too, against our own best interest?

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 7 points 17 hours ago

@Yolfen @supersquirrel @yesman It's aimed at the press and politicians. LLM model progress is visibly stalling so the next step is for OpenAI and Anthropic to go "Booga-booga-AI DOOM" and push for a regulatory environment that freezes out small upstart competitors/Chinese AI firms/self-hosted models. It's all about creating and exploiting a rental monopoly.

[–] thairanaru@bookstodon.com -1 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

@yesman @supersquirrel well, for one, didn't ai almost cause an attack on some chinese ship the other day?
I think they are always a mix of exaggeration and truth in these things

[–] lurker@awful.systems 2 points 4 hours ago

Almost did. But that wasn’t “the AI is secretly super smart!!!” it was “the AI hallucinated some bullshit and people nearly forgot to actually fact check it”

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 18 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Billionaires could cause a total population extinction, those deserve regulation first, before AI.

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 14 points 18 hours ago

Remember when Bill Gates lent his piece of shit opinion in on not letting India produce covid vaccines without patent approval and with their own production lines?

That murdered a whole lot of people all by itself.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 18 hours ago

how about we extinct all billionaires instead

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 16 hours ago

I don't understand why Bill Gates still feels the need to do marketing work

because he’s actively doing works to change the world in specific (negative) ways. look into the history of gates-tied funding in nutrition programs, he’s got a bad-shit-for-humanity track record spanning well past a decade. has “just” had a better PR team than the clowns of vogue

[–] QueenFern@lemmy.zip 13 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

This pedophile just won't go away

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 points 3 hours ago

after the news of him trying to ask epstein for advice how to give abx to his wife in secret after sleeping with russian prostitutes with STD who passed on to him and then to his wife. hes been solely focused on deflecting from this news, and not surprisingly dropped his pretense of "charitable" nature.

[–] k0e3@lemmy.ca 11 points 17 hours ago

Oh gosh this is so powerful, I better buy it before the other guys do! - some gullible CEO of a company

[–] P1nkman@lemmy.world 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

They quoted him wrong. He said "... will cause billionaires death...". Why else is he and the other billionaires suddenly shit scared of LLM's?

[–] JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago

The 'cutting edge ai anaesthetic system' could get the dosage wrong.

crosses fingers

[–] UpAndAtThem@lemmy.world 9 points 17 hours ago

They desperately need us to believe that it's skynet, so we dont realize it's just evil C3PO

[–] pikesley@mastodon.me.uk 4 points 19 hours ago
[–] ruuster13@lemmy.zip 1 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

The doomerism gets politicians talking about it instead of the problem right in front of them: these products are actively hacking into businesses across the world.

[–] GardenGeek@europe.pub 11 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

these products are actively hacking into businesses across the world.

No, they are not. They are used by people to do this. These systems aren't able to act unprompted hence this whole ,, they're breaking free" talk is nothing more but the companies trying to deflate the bubble they created before it pops with their money in it.

[–] bigiain@aus.social 3 points 9 hours ago

@GardenGeek "My lock picks broke containment and opened the bank vault! And my wheelbarrow went rogue and wheeled all the money out the vault and into my house!" @ruuster13

[–] Vaneshi@bitbang.social 2 points 9 hours ago

@GardenGeek @ruuster13

Given just how skeezy these AI companies are and how they've pretty much just given up on (C), fair use and the like...

I don't even think it's an 'agent' being sent out to do stuff, I think it's multiple departments of humans hacking & cracking their way to get to "free stuff" to feed their meat grinder or using their skills to undermine competitors knowing they can just blame the spicy auto-correct if they're caught.

[–] ruuster13@lemmy.zip 0 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

We're making the same argument. The people building these tools must be held accountable.

[–] self@awful.systems 4 points 8 hours ago

we don’t actually need anyone here to rebroadcast anthropic and openai’s marketing claims, thanks

[–] anise@awful.systems 3 points 13 hours ago

you aren't, you're making a similar arguments to the doomers. The problem they have isn't that their chatbots are "hacking people" or whatever, it's that there isn't a lot of room to either escalate or substantiate their claims left and not a lot of time to find a way to be profitable, somehow

[–] supersquirrel@lemmy.ca 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

the problem right in front of them:

Billionaires

[–] JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Cute of you to think they frequent the same joints as the rest of us commoners.