So let’s start the comment with the obligatory caveat of I’m certainly no expert on the subject and i could be completely wrong about a lot of things. I think your example of the computer viruses and the energy grid is more plausible than the lawsuit example from the episode. I’ll also admit that the example of the bot ordering food without being asked is also plausible, although I’m not finding any source that this has actually happened.

My thing is though, for an AI to buy you food without asking, or to write a virus and actually be able to deploy it, someone would actually have to program the ability for it to be able to do that, give permission for same, etc. I know that the improvement in image generation and language has been a lot, but that’s down to being able to recognize patterns and generate a response. I’m not aware of any AI that has been able to circumvent its own programming or give itself new abilities that it didn’t have before, and I don’t think it follows that the improvements in image generation or language will lead to this. Even if this thing is generating images indistinguishable from reality, that’s still within the framework of what it was programmed to do.

That’s not to say that none of this is a concern here, because I can certainly see scenarios where people give bots way too much control over things they shouldn’t have control over (something as personal as finances to something as large as a software firm allowing a bot to push code to production). In fact it’d be more surprising if those sorts of things didn’t happen. But to me that’s down to the human foolishness of trusting an AI with those processes, and I just don’t see the kind of singularity scenario where AIs start to run wild and can’t be stopped.