It’s finally happened: I’m now worried about AI. And consulting ChatGPT did nothing to allay my fears | Emma Brockes

Donald Trump and OpenAI’s Sam Altman at the White House in January 2025. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenDonald Trump and OpenAI’s Sam Altman at the White House in January 2025. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesIt’s finally happened: I’m now worried about AI. And consulting ChatGPT did nothing to allay my fearsEmma BrockesA highly alarming New Yorker feature on the machinations of Sam Altman drove me to test his AI for myself. The results were, well, highly alarming A corollary of the truism “don’t sweat the small stuff” is, by implication, “do sweat the big stuff”, but it can be hard to pick which big stuff to sweat. For example: since the 1970s, as the world has worried about inflation and rolling geopolitics, the big stuff we should have been sweating more urgently was the climate crisis. Last year, the top trending search on Google in the US was “Charlie Kirk”, with several terms relating to the threat posed by Donald Trump also popular, when the focus should arguably have been the threat posed by AI.Or, per my own Googling this week after reading Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz’s highly alarming lengthy piece in the New Yorker about the rise of artificial general intelligence: “Will I be a member of the permanent underclass and how can I make that not happen?”I’ll confess: prior to this moment of giving the subject more than two seconds’ thought, my anxieties around AI were extremely localised. I thought in immediate terms of my own ...