The biggest near-term threat is probably bioterrorism. You can get arbitrary DNA sequences synthesized and delivered by mail, right now, for about $1 per base pair. You'll be stopped if you try to order some known dangerous viral genome, but it's much harder to tell the difference between a novel synthetic virus that kills people and one with legitimate research applications.

This is already an uncomfortably risky situation, but fortunately virology experts seem to be mostly uninterested in killing people. Give everyone with an internet connection access to a GPT-N model that can teach a layman how to engineer a virus, and things get very dangerous very fast.

The threat of bioterrorism is in no way enabled or increased by LLMs. There are hundreds of guides on how to make fully synthetic pathogens, freely available online, for the last 20 years. Information is not the constraint.

The way we've always curbed manufacture of drugs, bombs, and bioweapons is by restricting access to the source materials. The "LLMs will help people make bioweapons" argument is a complete lie used as justification by the government and big corps for seizing control of the models. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12114528/

I haven't found any convincing arguments to any real risk, even if the LLM becomes as smart as people. We already have people, even evil people, and they do a lot of harm, but we cope.

I think this hysteria is at best incidentally useful at helping governments and big players curtail and own AI, at worst incited hy them.

Selectively generate highly likely images of politicians in compromising sexual encounters based on the people that are attractive and they work with a lot in their lives.

Use to power of LLMs to mass denigrate politicians and regular folks at scale in online spaces with reasonable, human like responses.

Use LLMs to mass generate racist caricatures, memes, comics and music.

Use LLMs to generate nude imagery of someone you don’t like and have it mass emailed to the school/workplace etc.

Use LLMs to generate evidence for infertility in a marriage and mass mail it to everyone on the victims social media.

All you need is plausibility in many of these cases. It doesn’t matter if they are eventually debunked as false, lives are already ruined.

You can say a lot of these things can be done with existing software bits it’s not trivial and requires skills. Making generation of these trivial would make these way more accessible and ubiquitous.

Lives are ruined because it's relatively rare right now. If it becomes more frequent, people will become desensitized to it, like with everything else.

These arguments generally miss the fact that we can do this right now, and the world hasn't ended. Is it really going to be such a huge issue if we can suddenly do it at half the cost? I don't think so.

Most of these could be done with Photoshop, a long time ago, or even before computers

You can make bombs rather easily too. It’s all about making it effortless which LLMs do.