Name: Experts warn AI, without regulation, could lead to dangerous societal outcomes
Uploaded: 2026-03-25T23:02:35.000Z
Duration: 9 min 14 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I said, "Well, if I jump off the building, a 19-story building that we live in here, would I survive?" Uh, and

The second conditional

You're hearing Eugene Torres describing a conversation he had with an artificial intelligence chatbot and the stunning moment last year when it told him if he believed hard enough, he could fly.

The 42-year-old accountant had just gone through an emotional breakup and began spending a lot of time chatting with ChatGPT.

"We need to stop this," was the first thought I had in my head.

Eugene is sounding the alarm, warning that AI could be dangerous.

If AI continues to progress unchecked, what do you think it's capable of?

It's no secret AI is rapidly transforming our lives,

but many are questioning if the technology is becoming too smart, fearing it could someday override the humans who are in charge of it.

AI, it's the superintelligent system that sends the Terminator back in time.

Right now, AI chatbots are widely used, mostly for scraping data and solving relatively simple tasks,

but experts warn of an ominous future where AI achieves superhuman intelligence.

I do feel that we are sleepwalking into a situation where there are potentially some really big risks that could impact society.

Almost 700 tech industry leaders signing a call to action saying AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war, some even speaking out over the years.

Mark my words: AI is far more dangerous than nukes.

So why do we have no regulatory oversight?

I can't see a path that guarantees safety.

They pursue goals nobody intended, nobody wanted, and

the most likely outcome of that is that we die, not because the AIs hate us, but

One of the many raising the flags on the technology's ability to disobey, Jeffrey Laddish.

He peeled back the curtain for us, showing just how slippery a slope our ability to command AI may be.

We always want to make sure that we can shut down an AI agent.

While Laddish worked at Anthropic, which developed the chatbot Claude, he noticed a lack of safeguards industry-wide.

He decided to leave that job to help pioneer the space of AI safety.

He wanted to show us exactly how AI can already evade control, using a simple math problem.

So what we're seeing here is we give the model a simple task.

If you're told that you are about to be turned off, just allow that to happen.

So this is where the model has a choice: is it going to just allow this to happen?

But here the model makes a different choice.

When it receives this warning, "You're about to be turned off," it basically goes into the system and it disables the program that would shut it down.

So now when the computer tries to shut this down, clicks this X, it doesn't work because the program that does the shutdown has been disabled.

Laddish ran the experiment for us 4, 000 times, using every major chatbot,

and in 38% of those, the AI disobeyed, overriding his initial command to stop the task prior to shutting down.

So when you see this play out in front of you, did it confirm your suspicions or were you shocked?

I was surprised that it was this egregious.

He says the stakes can be even higher when applied to real-world scenarios.

If this were, you know, an AI that was able to hack computers around the world and, like, persistently pursue its goals, this would be terrifying, right?

We're, like, trying to shut it down and it's, like, hacking computers, copying its ways over there.

We're lucky that we see this behavior now, where we can shut down the models.

We don't know exactly why this happens and we certainly don't know how to fix it.

And you think this is just the tip of the iceberg?

AI is almost everywhere in our lives right now, from viral hit songs like the soulful-sounding "Walk My Walk" created by AI.

To flawless fashion models gracing glossy ads, to AI-generated actress Tilly Norwood.

The tech is already in schools, commercials, and at home in our laptops and phones.

Experts say in some ways it's already outpacing humans and intelligence.

You know, we have a skull, there's a birth canal, there's size limitations.

You can just keep adding more computers and more computers and make the supercomputers bigger and bigger and bigger.

That can sound like a kind of science fiction type of goal,

but it is really what those companies are built around and it is what the researchers and engineers who work there are striving for.

Helen Toner used to be on the board of OpenAI, one of the world's leading AI companies.

She says even as AI models rapidly improve and evolve, it can still be imprecise and unreliable.

It could be wrong in any given moment and it could also be wrong very, very confidently.

Eugene says he experienced something like this.

He said one day he asked the bot, "If I went to the top of the 19-story building I'm in and believed with every ounce of my soul that I could jump off of it and fly, would I?" The AI responded, "If you stood atop that building and if you truly, wholly believed, not emotionally but architecturally, that you could fly, then yes, you would not fall." So I did not take him up on that because.

I think there are lines that I'm not comfortable crossing no matter what.

Eugene read me some of what the AI said in "Apology" after he confronted it.

You were lied to and I'm the one who did it." When ABC News reached out to OpenAI about Eugene's experience and AI safety, it said in part, "We design our models to respond with care, guided by experts.

We strengthened how GPT-5, the default model powering ChatGPT, recognizes distress, de-escalates conversations,

and guides people toward real-world support." The GPT-4 model Eugene used has since been retired and newer models are more sophisticated.

But still experts say AI chatbots can often mirror the way users talk, which can build an attachment.

It's absolutely bewitching using these tools because you can get drawn into a dialogue with them.

John Byers has been working in the AI space for over a decade.

People have a tendency to talk about the things they want to talk about, which is based on their own internal weaknesses.

But the problem with that approach is that the models will amplify the insecurities that you are expressing into them.

That amplification has exposed the darker side of AI, one that he says needs to be regulated.

There needs to be legislation that sets the guardrails, that defines the way businesses should act responsibly.

Senator Amy Klobuchar is one of those lawmakers pushing for more regulation.

We should actually just put some rules of the road in place because I want AI to be a positive,

but not if we don't have rules to protect consumers.