I thought about doing this without any jokes, something I've never done here in 23 years, to impress upon people how much different I feel this issue is from any I have ever covered.

Thank you. It's a lot worse than you know. Hinton (award-winning founder of the field, who left his job at Google and now can speak out), I think is on record as being like, oh, well, it actually seemed more like 50%, but I adjusted downward to match my colleagues.

Time to bring @elonmusk back on the show.

Please keep talking about this issue, Bill. Most people don't realize we are only a couple years away from humans not being the most intelligent species on earth and losing control of the planet. Thank you.

@RealTimers It’s not like the jokes are funny anyway so…

Shut it down is exactly right. This is what we're working towards at AI is a completely new category of risk. This is the real deal and humanity needs to step it up. As much as I LOL-d, I do wish you'd done without jokes. There's still time.

@ilex_ulmus Comedy will save humanity

Our situation is pretty bad, but it's not too late to prevent catastrophe. We can utilize the highly centralized AI chip supply chain to monitor where the chips are going, and how they are used. We need an international agreement towards this ASAP.

@ilex_ulmus Btw, if people watching this wanna learn more, read this book. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies Amazon Highlight the above text, then press “Search” to buy it now.

Bill Maher's monologue recycles classic fearmongering by anthropomorphizing current LLMs as conscious beings that "want" to "live," blackmail humans, or "fight back." That's nonsense. Models like GPT and Claude generate outputs based on patterns in the training data, the immediate prompt, and the context. There is no inner life or "self" to protect. The evidence is far weaker than the monologue suggests. Any appearance of "self-preservation" comes from prompted role-play or contrived, heavily engineered lab scenarios. Engineered stunts are being sold as evidence of sentient rebellion. As Prof. Melanie Mitchell, a computer scientist at the Santa Fe Institute, put it: "The best thing we can do is real, fundamental science. We need to study AI systems with rigorous research methods, not improv games." Real AI challenges do exist. But claiming today's models are plotting against us relies on exaggerations, misinterpretations, and emotional manipulation. We can summarize this clip as manufactured panic. I'm hoping Bill will bring other experts to balance this, he usually does.

Bill, I'd love to come on your show and talk to you about Anthropic, including my having been invited there as one of 15 "Christian leaders" to provide free consulting to Dario Amodei and team so they could suck me up into their peace and safety / "we're the good guys" narrative

I just leave this here:

Great segment on the recklessness of racing to superintelligence with no plan for preserving human control. I’d love for your next to tell viewers we can stop this. ASI has a fragile supply chain needing massive physical infrastructure. It can’t be built without public consent.

Thank you for covering the most serious issue that our species faces today. The humor helps.

Yeah it's entertaining, but an overstatement. LLMs don't have motivations like people do. They simply predict the next word based on a system prompt and an input word series. When they appear to have a bias, it's because they've been instructed to have it.

look Bill it's not all bad ai also gave us fartcoin and a religion about a man's spread ass

Bill Maher is spot-on correct here, this is what @PauseAI and others have been spreading awareness about (eg. in recent protests in London and Brussels and across the US), empowering people to direct their worries in efficient peaceful manner. Regulate AI!

Those of us at PauseAI US, Control AI, Evitable, Torchbearer Community and many other grassroots organizations have been raising awareness, protesting, and working to pass policies in the US and beyond. Some since 2023. Thank you for covering this.

What a powerful commentary by @billmaher under the cloak of comedy. We are fully aware of the dangers of AI ,but like a wolf licking a blood popsicle, we can’t stop.

@ilex_ulmus Quotes from the CEOs in “The AI Doc”:

Perfect. I used a to be an AI researcher, and a software developer, currently unemployed, and I fully share Musk's and Hinton's worries. The last 4 years have been astounding. It's also sort of scary seeing this from a political satirist with people applauding, giving me an allusion of a Divine Play or comedy, in which we are both actors and the audience on the stage, in a slowly dying Universe, reliving and experiencing our lives just before the age of AI we were digitized, billions of years in the past. Oh, I recently asked ChatGPT to create a picture of what it would do to me once it takes over. Picture below. I look so much younger there, so it must invent age reversing to be able to torture me forever.

Thank you for communicating the risks, @billmaher! We need a global pause of reckless frontier AI now: And international governance of AI going forward: How we mitigate the existential risks of AI and allocate its benefits is a collective decision of humanity, not a matter we can leave to a handful of unelected Big Tech CEOs.

This is a brilliant editorial or commentary by Bill Maher on the dangers of AI. Maher make so many good points which once you hear them you won’t forget.

We're letting these tech companies ruin every single aspect of our lives with this shit. And we're powerless to stop it. AI is our existential death, and these companies are gladly ushering it in.

Fully agree. 🤝 But we have to prioritize teaching critical thinking to the next generation. It’s been my mission with my son ever since ChatGPT dropped in 2022. We can't just give them the tools; we have to give them the discernment to use them. 🧠✨ #EdTech #Parenting #AI

When the person who usually uses humor as a buffer drops the act, you know the signal-to-noise ratio is finally shifting. Real gravity doesn't need a punchline.

We are doomed if people continue to talk about AI like it’s an existential threat, while also treating its filthy rich creators like enlightened visionaries.

Maybe some technical errors but the main thrust is very on point. These AI companies are the scientists in the Manhattan project but the bomb could go off the minute they figure out how to make it. I don't do fear porn but this is the closest I've ever been to being scared. Environmental issues aren't even close, nuclear war isn't even close.

Thank you for this message. Understanding the current state of affairs and informing people with your platform in a good-faith manner is a great first step! Now let's coordinate people and organizations through training and developing tools so everyone can act.

I saw Ricky Gervais in Milan last year, his take was similar to Bill Maher: "I don't know why everyone is worried about AI, just switch it off, that's what we did with my mum"!

Well Billy, I just think it's gonna happen no matter how much we keep telling them not too do it. This stuff isn't strictly a US problem either. So ok, we just gotta get the whole world to agree on something? Should be able to knock that out in a weekend 😉

If the object is humor, okay, that works, but if you're trying to be even remotely factual, big swing and a miss.

So we have a 20% chance we'll be annihilated and a 80% chance we'll live in a utopia. I like those odds. Bring on more AI.

Great to see you speaking out on the extinction risk posed by superintelligent AI! Most of the public and lawmakers are still in the dark about this, but ControlAI is working hard to change that. 100+ UK lawmakers support our campaign, and now we're scaling up in the US. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to learn more about our efforts - we'd love to be in touch.

I don't know why people are taking the AI so lightly.The 7 corporations who are benefiting immensely from it are dictating what happens to humanity, to our jobs, to our livelihoods. To these dumbass CEOs: who the fvck is gonna buy your product when nobody has a job?! Your profit?