Stop worrying about an AI apocalypse: Surfshark's engineer says extinction fears are just a 'marketing move'

Surfshark’s System Engineer dismisses recent AI extinction warnings as a recurring marketing tactic The real threats are already here, including deepfake fraud and the massive environmental toll of data centersCurrent LLMs might have reached their limit, making the "Skynet" narrative a distraction from serious user privacy risksOver the past week, the internet has been flooded with renewed warnings about the catastrophic dangers of artificial intelligence. From tech giants calling for pacing the frontier of AI development to researchers expressing fears of AI-driven human extinction, the doomsday narrative is back in full force.But not everyone is buying into the panic. According to Karolis Kaciulis, Lead System Engineer at Surfshark, one of the market's best VPN and consumer cybersecurity providers, these dystopian warnings are little more than a calculated distraction."The latest debate around AI threatening humanity is clearly a marketing move," Kaciulis told TechRadar. "AI companies use the same rogue-AI rhetoric every few months, and it is almost identical each time."While Silicon Valley executives and pundits continue to debate whether AI could really kill off humanity, Kaciulis argues that hyper-focusing on a sci-fi future blinds us to the very real, immediate problems that generative AI is already creating for everyday consumers.Real-world risks over sci-fi scenariosFor Kaciulis, the focus of the current AI safety debate is entirely misplaced. "The threat itself is fictional, closer to a Skynet-style sci-fi scenario than the problems generative AI is already causing today, from automated scams to intimidation," he explained.Rather than plotting to take over the world, generative AI is currently busy giving bad actors an incredibly effective toolkit. Kaciulis notes that while AI models aren't necessarily becoming independently dangerous, they are giving scammers much easier access to sophisticated methods of attack.The financial toll is already staggering. According to Surfshark's data, deepfake fraud has resulted in $2.19bn in losses globally, including $149m in the UK alone.There is also a mounting, hidden cost to the AI boom that rarely makes it into apocalypse narratives: the environment.“One of the most immediate risks from AI is its environmental cost: the wildlife and land lost to data centres, the huge amounts of energy they use and, by extension, the water needed to cool them," Kaciulis said.Surfshark's own research highlights this burden, estimating that a single ChatGPT query uses around 2Wh of energy on average, enough to run a 40W desk fan for three minutes. Multiplied across hundreds of millions of daily queries, the environmental impact mounts rapidly. (Image credit: Future)NEW: Leave No Trace — A weekly newsletter on digital privacy and online surveillance.Leave No Trace investigates the companies and governments putting our digital freedom at risk — and the people fighting back.📩 Subscribe now to get every edition delivered to your inbox every Friday, launching this September.Have large language models peaked?Beyond fraud and energy consumption, Kaciulis suggests that the AI industry might be projecting future dangers to mask a more mundane reality: the technology might be plateauing."The bigger danger for AI companies may be that no valuable scaling is possible anymore with the current state of LLMs. This may be as efficient as they ever get," he argued.According to Kaciulis, it remains entirely unclear whether newer models are actually better at performing requested tasks, or if they are simply getting better at imitating the responses we expect to see.This illusion of intelligence presents a massive privacy risk for users who mistakenly trust these tools with sensitive information. Because chatbots confidently ask follow-up questions while helping with research or tasks, users often forget they are interacting with a corporate data-gathering machine.“People do not really understand how chatbots work, or that what they pass to one may be accessible to the company behind it," Kaciulis warned.For now, it seems the best way to stay safe from AI isn't to prep for the apocalypse, but to protect your wallet and your personal data.Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!