There’s a 9 to 5 cartoon with someone holding a banner:

Down with “Artificial Intelligence”.
Bring back “Natural Stupidity”.

Someone commented:

That’s the exact reason that artificial intelligence is so popular.

Sadly, though, it is only a tool.

Thinks: “I have the solution to society’s problems! It’s This Stupid Thing. We must do This Stupid Thing!”

Then go to your AI such as ChatGPT and ask it for all the good in This Stupid Thing, all the reasons This Stupid Thing might help society, how to convince people to support This Stupid Thing and how to counter arguments against This Stupid Thing.

By carefully phrasing your questions (‘prompting’), you can get whatever answer you want.

You are then ready to propose, promote and implement This Stupid Thing.

You even get your AI to write press releases and social media posts promoting This Stupid Thing. It will create memes and fake photos of people protesting in support of This Stupid Thing. It will give you the sound bites and catchphrases for the trolls to repeat.

Whereas wicked and stupid people currently have to find corruptible or evil or spineless people to help them implement stupid ideas, AI has no conscience at all. And it won’t tell the papers what happened or publish a book revealing your secrets.

And you can be absolutely sure that political parties, corporations and hostile states are already very experienced in doing the above.

Believe me, AI will magnify “natural stupidity” to new heights.

Yep. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yeppity yep.

There are almost no controls in place yet; we don’t even understand what the real threats will be.

It’s like the first days of the motor carriage. “Think of the harm it might cause, and all the disruption to existing businesses and people” “Sod all that, think of the profits!”

Car manufacturers still resist proper seat belt designs. Tobacco companies still promote cancer sticks. Governments and corporations really could have fixed spam email thirty years ago. Governments and banks could have done much more to prevent online fraud which funds serious crime and terrorism.

But while it is only the little people suffering and there’s profit to be made, meh, who cares?

With the existing setup, we suspect we are being lied to but struggle to find the truth (and those who leak the truth get locked up). When AI gets being used in anger, we won’t have a clue what is true any more.