Does anyone else think that journals, and periodicals misrepresenting something like this is getting to be too much like journalistic terrorism? Or would calling them Luddites be a better characterization?
The problem is not that these people are not smart, but they tend to be very superficial. Reporting seldom rewards (or attracts) individuals who are interested in deep dives of anything. The culture is that of hot takes and fast ideas, which necessarily has resulted in a race to the bottom of content and meaning.
That is where this stuff comes from. It might be 'journalistic terror', but barring a total reboot of the field, I don't see how it will change.
It's just sensationalism.
Now I don't think that the major news organizations purposely publish fake stories but as another poster said, a little sensationalism while conveying an otherwise truthful story helps to encourage clicks and improves a papers bottom line.
With the ongoing demise of print and the rise of competition on the web, legitimate news organizations are attempting to compete and survive and often that means employing some of the methods that we find distasteful but are proven to work.
Nuclear power, for instance, received the same degree of FUD from uninformed commentators for decades that we're starting to see applied to ML and AI now. As a result, we clung to the precautionary principle and burned fossil fuels instead. The human toll associated with that decision, in terms of premature deaths and disabilities, will eventually run into the millions if it hasn't already.
I hope Elon Musk has thought his anti-AI arguments through farther than the activists and journalists of the 1960s and 1970s did. His voice is a powerful one with far-reaching influence. He could do a lot of good with it, or a lot of harm.
At the same time, the industries producing petroleum had a lot of incentive to do so. We can call this aggressive self preservation at best. At the worst, we can say they corrupted the media and global stability in order to do so. This is a very strong accusation, and not my point.
Musk and Friends finds themselves diametrically opposed to where the petroleum industries found themselves. Who then is taking the side of the petroleum industries in the AI case?