{"id":640329,"date":"2026-10-24T21:48:15","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T21:48:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/640329\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T21:48:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T21:48:15","slug":"will-generative-ai-do-more-harm-than-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/640329\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Generative AI do more harm than good?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In early March 2023, I had a debate with Keith Teare, hosted by the organization Open to Debate, on the question of whether ChatGPT would do more harm than good. I think about that question a lot, nearly every day. <\/p>\n

Right now, the negative argument against generative AI\u2014the ledger of bad things\u2014is quite serious. We have nonconsensual deep fake porn, a rise in phishing scams, wholesale disinformation, cognitive surrender, threats to democracy from the subtle influence of governments on LLMs, not to mention the use of generative AI as a surveillance tool. And the effects of all that IP theft on artists and writers, and potential negative effects more broadly across the employment market (though, mercifully, these have been more modest than some people expected).<\/p>\n

And then there is the deluge of hacks that some have called \u201cBlack October\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Paul Kedrosky just dubbed it The Hackening<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Marc Benioff, Salesforce\u2019s CEO, called it a \u201cCode red\u201d, amplifying a dark tweet from Anthropic\u2019s Jason Clinton. I think both are right. (Though, to be sure, Clinton thinks this awful period might last only a year or two.)<\/p>\n

\"X<\/p>\n

Marc Benioff@Benioff<\/p>\n

Jason is 100% right. Code red. \ud83d\udea8<\/p>\n

\"X<\/p>\n

Jason D. Clinton \ud83d\udd38 @JasonDClinton<\/p>\n

as bad as things have gotten in the past 4 days, they are going to get a lot worse before they get better. security leaders, never let a crisis go to waste: please go to your boards and ask for help right now. not for ai, for the basics. (we need to hold on for ~18 months.)<\/p>\n

11:09 PM \u00b7 Oct 22, 2026 \u00b7 844K Views<\/p>\n

89 Replies \u00b7 159 Reposts \u00b7 2.01K Likes<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a7<\/p>\n

But what about the positive side? Are all these risks worth taking? Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, at times fairly positive about the technology, just made a brutal case that many of the positive effects we were led to expect simply aren\u2019t materializing<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You can read the full thing here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It ain\u2019t over yet. And I certainly have friends who have gotten a lot out of generative AI (mainly for coding), but at this point it\u2019s not hard to make the argument that it has on the whole been a net detriment to society. <\/p>\n

And there is still the chance it will pull down the entire economy.<\/p>\n

Buckle up! Turbulence ahead.<\/p>\n

Bonus: I will return to Open to Debate on Tuesday<\/a> in Baltimore, partnered with Cathy O\u2019Neil. No public livestream, but there will eventually be edited versions both on YouTube and many NPR affiliates, including WNYC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In early March 2023, I had a debate with Keith Teare, hosted by the organization Open to Debate,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-640329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}