BROADCAST BIAS: Networks embrace their latest form of panic the AI apocalypse
Broadcast news often has a problem telling us what happened yesterday, or earlier in the day.These shows want to scare viewers about some dark and desperate future.
Forecasts, not facts.The newest eruption of doom came over artificial intelligence, and how it could end up causing the destruction of all humanity within a decade.
So much for soft-pedaling it.Coming out of the weekend, on the Sept.14 "Today," NBC co-host Savannah Guthrie sounded the alarm in the first seconds of the program: "Doomsday warning! The country’s leading developers of AI coming forward to call for a slowdown in the technology, saying humanity itself is at risk."Guthrie interviewed Josh Tyrangiel of The Atlantic magazine, asking: "How worried should we be?" He said, "Extremely worried," and laid out OpenAI’s "Hugging Face incident" from July, when AI bots independently engaged in a cyberattack on the AI startup called Hugging Face.
That led Guthrie to play up the possibility of "apocalyptic outcomes."AI HYSTERIA HAS A Y2K PROBLEM — AND THE STAKES THIS TIME COULD BE FAR HIGHEROn Sept.15, on ABC’s "World News Tonight," anchor David Muir sounded like a TV news snippet from a disaster movie.
"We do begin tonight with President Trump rejecting the new and dire warnings about AI, even as three of the top AI rivals agree now that it's time to slow it down, alarmed by what they're seeing and how quickly this is all moving."FILE: David Muir at the Giorgio Armani RTW Spring 2025 fashion show held at the Park Avenue Armory on October 17, 2024, in New York, New York.(Photo by John Nacion/WWD via Getty Images) It was President Donald Trump versus the big brains: "And tonight, even after that warning from a former AI researcher that there's a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans in a decade, tonight, President Trump saying the only guardrail AI needs is a high-IQ president, calling it a ‘hoax.’"TRUMP UNLOADS ON TECH TITANS PUSHING FOR SLOWDOWN ON EMERGING INDUSTRY: ‘WHOE...