But are they seriously reckoning with AI’s risks, or are they too busy doing what amounts to fantasizing about scenarios they’ve read in sci-fi novels? “Many AI developers are thinking about the technology’s most tangible problems while public conversations about AI — including those among the most prominent developers themselves — are dominated by imagined ones,” Reisner wrote. After someone in the audience complained that the immediate risks Tufekci raised, like chatbot addiction, were already known, Tufekci responded, “I don’t really see these discussions. The discourse around AI safety is often dominated by apocalyptic rhetoric, which is peddled even by the very billionaires building the stuff. British computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton — who received the Turing Award in 2018 alongside Bengio and former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun — has cast himself as an Oppenheimer-like figure in the field.