I've always strongly disagreed with this particular threat model of AI safety. To me, the biggest threat of AI isn't autogenerated spammy fake news or social media posts (how much cheaper is it really than just hiring a 5-cent army to do that? Aren't there diminishing returns for doing this too much? Since this is basically inevitable isn't it a better idea to teach people not to believe stuff they read from unreliable strangers on the internet?).

Rather the biggest threat is centralization, where a single corporation (e.g. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, a single government agency) controls the AI, censors/limits it in places that are inconvenient to it and its profits, snoops on all communications with no regard for privacy, etc. OpenAI already does this, and they're quite clear and open about it.

And what I'm REALLY concerned about is AI companies like OpenAI building a cutting-edge AI, then lobbying governments to prevent anybody else from building one freely for the sake of "safety". AI safety researchers hired by AI companies have a clear conflict of interest here. I think that the ONLY way to make sure AI is safe is if it has 100% transparency, i.e. open source and freely available models that anybody can run and test themselves.