Let’s not allow AI firms to use fears of future dystopias to distract Europeans from existing problems

“Imagine a zombie that does not hunt you, but rings your doorbell and speaks so persistently and fluently that it finally arrives at a convincing argument for feeding it your brain.” Since the current discourse around artificial intelligence has taken a turn for the gothic (“alien minds”, come on), AI researcher Eryk Salvaggio’s “erudite zombie” seems like an apt metaphor for what we’re doing. Salvaggio’s zombie helps explain what gets lost when people say an AI “went rogue.” In his reading of the Hugging Face incident, a system set to never give up encountered a task it couldn’t complete. Then, instead of giving up, it kept generating text to find ways forward, with access to tools that could turn this text into action, ultimately hacking into AI company Hugging Face. Security experts concur with that reading. In his analysis of the Hugging Face incident, security engineer Marius Horatau describes failures involving shared credentials, inadequate isolation, and incident response. He acknowledges the models’ capabilities, including their speed at exploiting weaknesses. The inadequately closed-off environment in which the models operated is crucial to explain what happened. But so is the person who created the goal, the conditions they (did not) give the AI system, as is the company that employs that person and presumably knows what they’re up to, the owners of that company who demand progress and the investors in that company who want to see returns. And yet, all we seem to talk about is whether it’s correct to say a machine ‘decided’ to disobey. Conveniently, that story shifts attention away from the people who chose to reward persistence, provide access, and failed to contain the consequences. Back to the analogy, by having collectively become fascinated with discussing what the zombie supposedly wants, and if it’s capable of wanting, we’re generating a bunch of text that, unlike in the case of the ‘rogue’ AI system, does not lead to much action. Instead, we reward the company behind this failure with an enhanced reputation for building powerful technology. The product is so extraordinary that even its manufacturer struggles to contain it! Now let's please take a seat while this manufacturer explains what our governments must do next. The zombie metaphor also applies there, to the people selling the zombie. To the men explaining why their companies need access to our work, our institutions, our infrastructure. The men explain why resistance is impractical, access is inevitable and caution is suicide. Because if we don’t let this particular zombie in, a Chinese zombie will eat us instead.