SPOOKY season is nearly over for another year, which will come as a relief to those who’ve been trying to dodge confrontations with the increasingly large and ominous decorations filling homewares stores.

These days, apparently no suburban home is complete without a child-sized diabolical doll hanging from the porch, or a contorted clown sitting on a patio chair.

While the horror movie effigies will soon be headed into lofts and landfill sites, scenarios straight out of a sci-fi thriller will soon be up for discussion on the news in between the unbearable scenes of death and destruction in Gaza.

On All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day Rishi Sunak is hosting an international AI safety summit at Bletchley Park, the English country house that’s synonymous with the codebreakers who were based there during the Second World War.

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The setting certainly doesn’t do anything to dial down the drama surrounding this area of technology, the imminent development of which could have repercussions of huge historical significance.

The last 18 months or so have transformed public understanding of what artificial intelligence is, and what it may soon be capable of doing – including the threat of many human employees being replaced, and the significant potential for unrest that would bring.

The recent and ongoing Hollywood strikes may come to be viewed as critical early battles in a much broader fight by workers against the technology that could make them redundant.

Programmes such as the chatbot ChatGPT and the image-generator Midjourney would have surely been unimaginable to Alan Turing and his colleagues, who used the world’s first programmable digital electronic computer to decipher intercepts from the Germans.

And it would have taken several more leaps of their imaginations to perceive how the use of this technology could potentially become a matter of life or death.

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This week’s summit aims to “build a shared global understanding of the risks posed by Frontier AI”, which is defined as “highly capable general-purpose AI models that can perform a wide variety of tasks and match or exceed the capabilities present in today’s most advanced models”.

Ahead of it, the UK Government has published a paper warning that while such a scenario is considered unlikely, there is “insufficient evidence to rule out that future Frontier AI, if misaligned, misused or inadequately controlled, could pose an existential threat.” Crikey.

For some researchers, the capabilities of today’s most advanced models are already scary enough, even before we consider hypothetical future catastrophes. Aidan Gomez, whose work helped bring chatbots into existence, told The Guardian that politicians should focus their attention on “much more tangible and immediate” risks, such as the spread of misinformation.

Minutes after I read his words about the ability of existing models to “create media that is extremely convincing, very compelling, virtually indistinguishable from human-created text or images or media”, a pal sent me Sunak’s Twitter/X post announcing he would be in conversation with Elon Musk on Thursday, after the summit.

It features a gif showing the numbers on 10 Downing Street morphing into the logo of Musk’s social media platform.

The National:

Surely the British Prime Minister would never have put out such a thing? But no – it’s real, the date is set.

Who needs misinformation when you have a Prime Minister making ill-judged moves of this proportion, sending out the visual message that the UK Government’s approach to AI regulation is likely to be indistinguishable from that of a capricious, egomaniacal tech billionaire?

Musk was, perhaps surprisingly, among the signatories of a March letter published by the Future of Life Institute that called for a six-month moratorium on the development of large-scale AI systems so that shared safety protocols could be developed.

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Six months later, Wired reported that he was among those who “didn’t wait long to ignore his own call for a slowdown”. This somewhat misses the point – the signatories wanted everyone to halt, so there was in fact no contradiction in picking up pace after no agreement was reached.

Sunak will not be calling for a moratorium but he has announced that the UK is setting up an AI safety institute that will “carefully examine, evaluate and test new types of AI so that we understand what each new model is capable of”.

It sounds suspiciously like the UK hopes to evaluate the speed and direction at which various artificially intelligent horses are galloping after they have exited through an open stable door, but if he can get key global players on board with a strategy to stop machines eradicating human life altogether, well, that would definitely be a plus.

Before then, we just have to worry about the comparatively trifling threats of dangerous misinformation flooding the internet, cyber-attacks bringing down public services, and terrorists using AI to manufacture bioweapons. Let’s hope plenty of serious talk precedes Thursday night’s surreal scenes.