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Scientists Sound Alarm on AI-Generated Biological Viruses Amid Unregulated Industry
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
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We've been living with the human capability to make and deliver super lethal viruses for what 40+ years and have methods in place to control it at the manufacturing level. 'genAI' is way too incompetent at this stage to achieve both a functional virus and evade those manufacturing safeguards and likely LLMs always will be, too stochastic. This is quite aligned to look how scary our AI is marketing.
That said, virus is one of the studied extinction event scenarios for a true AGI/ASI. It would be prudent to double down on the manufacturing security, or, you know, go Butlerian at least until we have an excellent grasp on alignment (IMO you can't align an ASI, it's literally beyond our comprehension). But capitalism's gonna capitalist, existential threat be damned, just look at global warming.
Honestly, we really should pop the ai bubble and go full Luddite butlerian jihad
He says on his favorite thinking machine.
You think PCs think? Wow.
"Too stochastic" is nonsense. Neurons are stochastic. Also they made 16 from scratch.
They made hundreds and 16 worked (when synthesized by humans), seems stochastic to me. Humans do better to my knowledge (I'm out of touch but do have a relevant background). It's based on LLM architecture (using genes and proteins in place of language), also known as a stochastic parrot, which was the sense in which I was using it.
I don't deny it's a scary technology, more because of the likelihood of mistakes (or as AI companies like to say, 'hallucinations', anthropomorphising as advertising) than any intention.
As usual with this type of technology you need to be competent with the field before it becomes a force multiplier, and those people could already make viruses, and have been able to for a long time. For example, one of the previous stochastic methods was randomized mutation in a specific environment.
Do humans do better? By what objective metric? How many of these have humans even made in history?
Also you don't really need a human to verify these outputs, they just tried them. How many of these have humans even made? Also for the first of its kind with no previous rlhf scheme a 5% success rate is actually insane, this rate has historically dramatically improved with successive versions.
The stochastic parrot paper was nonsense, neurons are entirely stochastic. Stochastic models can be made very accurate
All it takes is for some of the people in those manufacturing safeguards to start depending on the AI to tell them if a proposed virus is safe or not...
I'd say it'd take a fair bit more, but it's a risk, hence