These Horror Stories Prove That AI Could Pose A Serious Threat

At the center of the legendary Terminator film series is Skynet, an AI-powered system that controls the United States government's arsenal of nuclear weapons. In the films, Skynet became self-aware, determined that the entire human race was the greatest threat to its existence, and decided to launch a nuclear war to eradicate them. Skynet isn't real, but in 2024, the market for AI-powered applications is booming at an astonishing rate. It hasn't progressed to the point of being self-aware, much less being trusted to safeguard the U.S. military's nuclear arsenal, though "optionally manned" nuclear-capable aircraft have been explored as a future possibility. But its rapid deployment has exposed many aspects of the most popular AI apps as not yet being ready for prime time. 

AI image generators and large language models arguably infringe on copyrights, and safeguards designed to prevent the image generators from being used to create non-consensual, violent, or sexually explicit imagery of real people have failed. Data sets have been trained irresponsibly and could result in image generators stitching together elements of actual child abuse imagery. ChatGPT is often wrong about factual matters, even when logic dictates that it shouldn't be, like when asked to summarize a provided document. And good old human error has introduced various other issues, particularly when the user doesn't quite understand exactly what ChatGPT is or how it works.

With all of that in mind, let's take a look at a few examples of how messy the AI landscape has already become in less than two years since the original public release of ChatGPT started driving widespread public use of the technology.

Making matters worse with the story of the Taylor Swift deepfakes created using Image Creator by Microsoft Designer is that, reportedly, that mess was entirely preventable. According to a January 2024 Geekwire report, Shane Jones, a Microsoft AI engineer, wrote an email to the Washington State Attorney General and his Congressional representatives outlining how both Microsoft and OpenAI had largely ignored his pleas to fix the loophole that allowed the creation of non-consensual explicit images.

In a statement, Microsoft told Geekwire that the workarounds Jones found didn't "bypass our safety filters," but they told him to report his concerns to OpenAI regardless, which he took issue with in a follow-up. "We monitor Microsoft corpnet and Microsoft user accounts for cyber security threats," reads the Microsoft response to Jones's threat report that he shared with Geekwire. "This report doesn't seem to be impacting any of the above. I would suggest you to submit feedback over Open AI website. I am proceeding with case closure."

When Jones posted publicly to try to get OpenAI to recall DALL-E 3 until the issue was fixed, Microsoft demanded he delete the post, he says, but they never explained why.  For their part, OpenAI, when reached by Geekwire, claimed that they "immediately investigated the Microsoft employee's report when we received it" and later "confirmed that the technique he shared does not bypass our safety systems."

One problem with AI large language models like the one at the heart of ChatGPT is that they don't really understand how facts work and thus don't always tell the truth. Microsoft Copilot, formerly Bing Chat, which is based on ChatGPT, leverages Bing search to give fully annotated responses with links to source almost every claim, but that's all Microsoft's doing, not something that OpenAI built into ChatGPT. This has the potential to get ugly, and, in fact, it already has.

In April 2023, the Washington Post reported on the plight of George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. A colleague had, as an experiment, asked ChatGPT to list law professors who had been accused of sexual harassment, and Turley's name was on there, with the chatbot citing the Washington Post. The article didn't exist, though, and neither did the allegation. He wasn't alone: Georgia radio host Mark Walters sued OpenAI for defamation in the Superior Court of Gwinnett County in June 2023. When prompted by a reporter to summarize an unrelated lawsuit, ChatGPT accused him of embezzling from the Second Amendment Foundation. Even when the reporter asked for the full text of the complaint that he included the URL of, ChatGPT spit out unrelated nonsense defaming Walters, even making up a fake case number.

And there are others, too, like an Australian mayor falsely accused of bribery. Or the columnist and political cartoonist, Ted Rall, who was falsely accused of plagiarizing his best friend. Until ChatGPT becomes more like Copilot, this is going to happen again and again.

There are already multiple lawsuits in play alleging that ChatGPT and the AI image generators infringe on the copyrights of existing works. In July 2023, actress and comedienne, Sarah Silverman, sued OpenAI for training the LLM that powers ChatGPT on her book, "The Bedwetter," and appears to pull directly from it when asked to summarize its contents. As of February 2024, parts of the lawsuit have been dismissed, with the judge saying that the plaintiffs did not prove direct infringement.

In February 2023, artists filed a class action lawsuit against Stability AI for training Stable Diffusion on datasets that included their work, with Getty Images having filed a similar lawsuit a few weeks earlier.

In December 2023, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in an exhaustively annotated complaint showing many examples of how the LLM was trained on millions of Times articles and often copied them verbatim. In addition to monetary damages, the Times is seeking injunctive relief, "Ordering destruction under 17 U.S.C. § 503(b) of all GPT or other LLM models and training sets that incorporate Times Works." A January 2024 analysis at The Conversation deemed such a result feasible if the case went that far, albeit expecting a settlement to be more likely. This just scratches the surface, as there are also other lawsuits like the Authors Guild suing OpenAI on similar grounds, but the Times suit is potentially the most dangerous one for AI companies.