Two thoughts on this. First, describing what's going on as "the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie" is not a great way to beat the "these are unserious people who

Two thoughts on this. First, describing what's going on as "the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie" is not a great way to beat the "these are unserious people who have consumed too much sci-fi" allegations. Second, I genuinely believe that there is no intentional media strategy to talk up x-risk, and indeed that the top brass at the labs would prefer that this discourse go away. But there is selection bias that goes into who works in the AI space. People tend to believe that their own work is Big and Serious and Important. You don't become a marine biologist if you think marine life is just okay. Many of the people making these claims now come from institutions and social circles where claims of imminent danger from autonomous systems predates GPT-2. And even if you don't come in convinced that what you're doing is The Biggest Possible Deal, if you spend all your time working on AI and talking to other people about AI, you are eventually going to start thinking in similar ways. The obvious retort would be that it is wrong to disqualify the opinions of a person just because they spend too much time working on something, as this would silence the most knowledgeable voices. This is doubtless true as far as it goes. These claims are worth taking seriously, and there is no reason to suspect that they represent the beliefs of some sort of lunatic fringe. At the same time, however, it is irresponsible to present them as coming from an entirely neutral source. Just because they are not deliberately astroturfed does not mean that they represent an objective truth.