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SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Aug. 14, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Software billionaire Dan O’Dowd, the world’s leading authority on software that never fails and can’t be hacked, kicks off a public awareness campaign about the defects of Artificial Intelligence via full-page ads running in today’s Wall Street Journal and New York Times. 

The ads also mark the launch of a wider AI-focused campaign from O’Dowd’s software safety advocacy group The Dawn Project, which for the past two years has focused on raising public, political and regulatory awareness of the critical safety defects in Tesla’s self-driving AI software. 

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The ads are the latest salvo in The Dawn Project’s campaign to ensure that the software deployed in our safety critical infrastructure is held to the highest possible standards and cannot be hacked. O’Dowd and The Dawn Project are campaigning to raise awareness surrounding the danger of a cataclysmic cyberattack resulting from the use of easily hacked, bug-ridden commercial grade software in safety-critical applications, such as water systems and the power grid.

The Dawn Project’s campaign is rooted in O’Dowd’s forty years of experience developing secure operating systems used in nuclear bombers, NASA spacecraft and fighter jets. The group calls on the US government to apply the software security standards demanded for nuclear systems to critical infrastructure. The Dawn Project notes that a cyberattack that disabled US critical infrastructure would cripple the country and cause millions of casualties. 

The ads also criticize Silicon Valley for squandering billions of dollars on supposedly intelligent systems which are woefully defective. The Dawn Project slams Big Tech for adding trillions to their market caps by hoodwinking investors and shareholders with promises of revolutionary AI systems. 

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The full-page ads examine whether Silicon Valley’s attempt to develop defective artificial intelligence systems should be characterized as “The Magnificent Scam by the Magnificent Seven”.

Click here to read The Dawn Project’s Full-Page Ad Highlighting the Dangers of AI

Now, The Dawn Project is bringing public attention to the disparity between Silicon Valley’s claims and AI’s actual capabilities, calling upon governments and regulators to remove AI from safety critical systems due to the defects in these models. The ads are particularly critical of Tesla, OpenAI, Microsoft and Google who between them have sunk billions into AI systems that are still riddled with defects.

The ads denounce Tesla’s AI powered Full Self-Driving software, which after ten years of development will still illegally overtake a stopped school bus and run down children crossing the road. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times ad campaigns follow a series of Super Bowl commercials broadcasted by O’Dowd and The Dawn Project in 2023 and 2024 and five NYT ads published in 2022 which exposed the critical safety defects of Tesla’s self-driving AI. 

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The Dawn Project also cites the contrast between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seeking $7 trillion in investment and Chat-GPT failing to correctly list US states ending in the letter Y. The ads further reference Google’s Gemini depicting a Black man and Asian woman when asked to generate a Nazi soldier, despite tens of billions of dollars sunk into its development.  

Founder of The Dawn Project, Dan O’Dowd, commented: “After widening our analysis of AI systems to beyond Tesla’s defective self-driving AI, we have identified additional safety concerns which need to be urgently addressed. It is high time that somebody exposes AI Snake oil merchants like Elon Musk and Sam Altman for peddling ‘mind-blowing’ AI that is in reality dumb as a stump. AI proponents are no better than gamblers who insist their ‘systems’ are sound and deceive investors and the public alike with false promises.

“Defective AI models are now being incorporated into systems that control the critical infrastructure our civilization relies on, as well as military applications. 

“The government must urgently review the cybersecurity of our critical infrastructure and should immediately raise the security standards for software that controls it. AI researchers accept that “hallucinations” are a fundamental and unsolvable weakness of Large Language Models and admit that they cannot explain why AIs make certain bad decisions. We must demand consistency and reliability in our safety critical systems. We must reject hallucinating AIs and apply the same rigorous standards of software security we demand for nuclear security to the critical infrastructure that society and millions of lives depend on.

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“In any other situation, a CEO that squandered billions of dollars on a defective system would be ousted immediately, yet this reckless corporate negligence is somehow permissible when it pertains to AI. Elon Musk says he deserves a $55 billion paypacket despite Tesla’s self-driving AI driving on the wrong side of the road, illegally overtaking stopped school buses and running down children after a decade of development.

“Corporations around the world have been sucked into a tornado of unjustified AI hype emanating from Silicon Valley. Companies which have no need or use for AI feel forced to keep up and incorporate these systems into their businesses at the cost of billions of dollars. Investors and boards of directors, hoodwinked by Silicon Valley’s modern-day itinerant preachers selling patent medicine, now feel that their companies are being left behind if they do not embrace AI. 

“After every embarrassing failure, Silicon Valley’s CEOs cling to the false belief that more computing power and more money is the only thing standing between us and an AI powered utopia. These carnival barkers assure investors that the issue is a lack of funding, rather than fundamental defects in their woeful systems. 

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“Not only is the AI experiment wasting tens of billions of dollars, it is putting the public at grave risk. Tesla’s self-driving AI has already been involved in the deaths of 36 people and has been implicated in over 1,300 crashes. Companies are applying AI systems that fail 5th grade math to military technology, and are irresponsibly using them in systems that control our critical infrastructure.

“The hype around AI is the latest Silicon Valley fad to take the world by storm. When the Al hype bubble bursts, the companies that focused on technology development instead of Al will have built up an insurmountable technological lead on gullible competitors that focused on AI.”

A link to the ad can be found here: https://bit.ly/3SJLHkr

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