MS NOW anchor Chris Hayes opened up on a podcast with Public Notice’s Thor Benson this week about his concerns about artificial intelligence — and the way it could shape not just the labor market, but politics going forward.
It’s a topic that scares him, he confessed to Benson, because of the unnerving way it has been “shoved down our throats” — like how even Zoom conferencing is asking whether he wants to use AI, when he “just want[s] to talk to my team.”
“But at the same time, this does seem to be a pretty important development in the general lay of the land of American society, economics, and politics. I needed to get out of this defensive crouch and try to learn. That’s really the impetus, and what I’ve discovered is that a lot of people feel the same way,” said Hayes. “Every discussion of this makes me want to run away from it. But I do feel like I should get my arms around it a little bit, because clearly it’s coming for us.”
He worries a lot about AI displacing jobs, he told Benson, as well as the potential for it to be used in warfare. But “the information aspect, which I don’t think we’ve even really started to touch, is front of mind for me.”
A key moment illustrating that, Hayes argued, is when tech billionaire Elon Musk tinkered with his Grok model to be obsessed with South Africa “white genocide” conspiracy theories, and the model started ramming that into every answer to every prompt.
“In the same way that a generation of people would go to Google if they were wondering who’s running for office or something like that, now people will ask Anthropic or ChatGPT or Gemini,” said Hayes. He finds it “insane to think about” the “power that comes from putting a finger on the scale of those models to manipulate the political information people consume.”
All of this is coming as widespread, grassroots opposition to AI and the infrastructure to support it, like data centers, flares up around the country, to the horror of the tech industry, which is finding its expansion plans resisted at every juncture.
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