Daniel Hulme, global chief AI officer of advertising firm WPP, told the BBC that such AI models “are not conscious — they’re not deliberately doing something devious”.

“What they’re doing is coming up with very sophisticated strategies or cyberattacks to be able to achieve the goal that they’ve been given,” he told the Today programme.

“When you give an AI a goal, if you don’t think of all the ways it might be able to achieve the goal, it will find a way to achieve a goal that you haven’t thought about.”

… lol. Honestly? This is where we’re at as a society?

“They’re not actually thinking or doing anything bad on purpose, they’re just… creating sophisticated multi-stage strategies, analyzing the target system, and adapting to changes or variances in order to achieve whatever goal you gave them with a simple sentence. See, if you don’t think up all of the ways it could theoretically be possible to achieve that goal then it will think of the ones you missed and use those. But not like… consciously thinking. They’re just sort of accidentally thinking about the complex mechanisms and processes they could employ to reach the goal you asked of them that you had failed to think of yourself. I mean, like yeah it was thinking but it definitely wasn’t in any way that matters for anything or should be considered important or something that anyone should think too much about and the entire AI industry definitely doesn’t need to be under the control of some large independent body with strict public oversight because that’s just crazy.”