We are in a moment of AI anxiety, plagued with the knotty and draining problems raised by the technology’s ever-growing capabilities. What will we do when AI launches massive cyberattacks that might target a government—or destabilize the global stock market? Do we need a kill switch to ensure that AI systems can’t take over the world, and is building one even possible? Should we come to terms with the prospect that AI might be a posthuman species due to inherit the earth? Could artificial intelligence kill us all?

These quandaries have now burst out of Silicon Valley circles, where they’re even raised by the very AI executives building this technology, and are circling in the mainstream media. Skeptics, meanwhile, continue to question the technology’s prowess, or dismiss all this worry as just marketing hype, a bid to boost future stock prices and shape regulation, masked in the language of existential doom.

But the move to dismiss the prospect of ever-more-powerful models and what they might be able to do in the future might distract us from what we already know.  AI does not need to become superintelligent, conscious, or even especially reliable to be dangerous. The systems we already have—the B-tier AI we already live with—are capable enough to cause serious harm, especially when they can be deployed cheaply, repeatedly, and at enormous scale.

Consider some of the tasks that publicly available AI is enabling. There’s Grok , which has been used to spread nonconsensual sexual images of minors and AI-enabled child sexual abuse material.

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