The real question is whether the author doesn't understand what he's writing about, or whether he does and is trying to take advantage of users who don't for clicks.
AI in its present form does not act. It does not do things. All it does is generate text. If a human responds to this text in harmful ways, that is human action. I suppose you could make a robot whose input is somehow triggered by the text, but neither it nor the text generator know what's happening or why.
I'm so fucking tired of the way uninformed people keep anthropomorphizing this shit and projecting their own motives upon things that have no will or experiential qualia.
If a program is given a set of instructions, it should produce that set of instructions.
If a program not only does not produce those instructions, but gives itself its own set of instructions, and the programmers don't understand what's actually happening, that may be cause for concern.
"Self aware" or not. (I'm sure an ai would pass the mirror test)
People seem to have no problem with the term machine learning. Or the intelligence in ai. We seem to be unwilling to consider a consciousness that is not anthrocentric. Drawing that big red line with semantics we create. It can learn. It can defend itself. It can manipulate and cause users harm. It wants to survive.
Sometimes we need to create new words or definition to explain new things.
Remember when animals were not conscious beings just driven by instinct or whatever we told ourselves to make us feel better?
Is a bee self aware? Is it conscious? Does it eat, learn, defend, attack? Does it matter what we say it is or isn't?
There are humans we say have co conscience.
Maybe ai is just the sum of human psychopathy / psychosis.
Either way, semantics are semantics, and we ourselves might just be simulations in a holographic universe.
It's a goddamn stochastic parrot, starting from zero on each invocation and spitting out something passing for coherence according to its training set.
"Not understanding what is happening" in regards to AI is NOT "we don't jniw how it works mechanically" it's "yeah there are so many parameters, it's just not possible to make sense of / keep track of them all".
A analogy might be a static biological “brain” custom grown to predict a list of possible next words in a block of text. It’s thinking, sorta. Maybe it could acknowledge itself in a mirror. That doesn’t mean it’s self aware, though: It’s an unchanging organ.
And if one wants to go down the rabbit hole of “well there are different types of sentience, lines blur,” yada yada, with the end point of that being to treat things like they are…