You know you can play with AI models yourself and get a feel for what is actually going on with AI and what it can do at present. There is an open source AI project called GPT-Neo with a lot of enthusiasts making models and contributing to the open project with good results.

It is complex and not super easy to just set up on your home computer but you can do it if you put a little determination into it. You can also see the GPT model working with AI Dungeon. Play with that and you'll see it isn't too terribly threatening just yet.

AI has the potential to be our best or our worst invention. Science fiction has explored the topic well and on the positive side try out the Culture books by Ian Banks, first of which was "The Player of Games" and on the ultimate dark side the short story by Harlan Ellison, "I have no mouth and I must scream."

There are reasons to hope, and reasons to fear. The open source community gives me hope that more ordinary people will help build a gentle AI that is not infused with our darkest urges and directives. Projects funded by governments and mega corps, which include the likes of both the American and Chinese governments and mega corps like Google and Microsoft (make no mistake--Google turned evil years ago) may lead to terrible, terrible outcomes.

The bottle has already been uncorked and there's no going back. The genie is coming out of the bottle as we speak, but what form it ultimately takes is still up to us.