Authors
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Aaron J. Snoswell
Senior Research Fellow in AI Accountability, Queensland University of Technology
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Niusha Shafiabady
Associate Professor in Computational Intelligence, Australian Catholic University
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Sarah Vivienne Bentley
Research Scientist, Responsible Innovation, Data61, CSIRO
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Seyedali Mirjalili
Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Business and Hospitality, Torrens University Australia
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Simon Coghlan
Senior Lecturer in Digital Ethics; Deputy Director, Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, The University of Melbourne
Disclosure statement
Aaron J. Snoswell was previously part of a research team that competitively won a grant to receive research project funding from OpenAI in 2024–2025 to develop new evaluation frameworks for measuring moral competence in AI agents. The project has now completed and I no longer receive funding from OpenAI.
Niusha Shafiabady, Sarah Vivienne Bentley, Seyedali Mirjalili, and Simon Coghlan do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Partners
University of Melbourne and CSIRO provide funding as founding partners of The Conversation AU.
Queensland University of Technology, Australian Catholic University, and Torrens University Australia provide funding as members of The Conversation AU.
DOI
There are many claims to sort through in the current era of ubiquitous artificial intelligence (AI) products, especially generative AI ones based on large language models or LLMs, such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and many, many others.
AI will change the world. AI will bring “astounding triumphs”. AI is overhyped, and the bubble is about to burst. AI will soon surpass human capabilities, and this “superintelligent” AI will kill us all.
If that last statement made you sit up and take notice, you’re not alone. The “godfather of AI”, computer scientist and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, has said there’s a 10–20% chance AI will lead to human extinction within the next three decades. An unsettling thought – but there’s no consensus if and how that might happen.
So we asked five experts: does AI pose an existential risk?
Three out of five said no. Here are their detailed answers.
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