Stop worrying about an AI apocalypse: Surfshark's engineer says extinction fears are just a 'marketing move'

Surfshark’s System Engineer dismisses recent AI extinction warnings as a recurring marketing tactic The real threats are already here, including deepfake fraud and the massive environmental toll of data centers Current LLMs might have reached their limit, making the "Skynet" narrative a distraction from serious user privacy risks Over the past week, the internet has been flooded with renewed warnings about the catastrophic dangers of artificial intelligence.

From tech giants calling for pacing the frontier of AI development to researchers expressing fears of AI-driven human extinction , the doomsday narrative is back in full force.

But not everyone is buying into the panic.

According to Karolis Kaciulis, Lead System Engineer at Surfshark , one of the market's best VPN and consumer cybersecurity providers, these dystopian warnings are little more than a calculated distraction.

"The latest debate around AI threatening humanity is clearly a marketing move," Kaciulis told TechRadar.

"AI companies use the same rogue-AI rhetoric every few months, and it is almost identical each time." While Silicon Valley executives and pundits continue to debate whether AI could really kill off humanity , Kaciulis argues that hyper-focusing on a sci-fi future blinds us to the very real, immediate problems that generative AI is already creating for everyday consumers.

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View Deal Real-world risks over sci-fi scenarios For Kaciulis, the focus of the current AI safety debate is entirely misplaced.

"The threat itself is fictional, closer to a Skynet-style sci-fi scenario than the problems generative AI is already causing today, from automated scams to intimidation," he explained.

Rather than plotting to take over the world, generative AI is currently busy giving bad actors an incredibly effective toolkit.

Kaciulis notes that while AI models aren't necessarily becoming independently dangerous, they are giving scammers much easier access to sophisticated methods of attack.

The financial toll is already staggering.