OpenAI trial judge tells Elon Musk to knock it off with all the Terminator talk

See, part of Musk’s contention in the trial is that he gave OpenAI all that money—which helped keep the lights on back in the day, even if it’s an incredibly tiny fraction of the kind of investments the Microsoft-backed firm gets now—because he’s genuinely worried about the Rise Of The Machines. Pretty literally, in fact, in so far as Musk apparently kept bringing up the Terminator movies specifically, telling the trial’s jury that “We don’t want to have a Terminator outcome,” and then understating, when asked what he meant, that “In the movie it’s not a good situation.” Rogers, who’d already had to oversee three days of reported bickering between Musk and OpenAI’s lawyer, had to step in to remind him that the trial is not, in fact, about whether “robot armies” are coming to step on all our skulls, saying, “We’re not going to talk about extinction in this case. They got it, that’s enough.”

When Musk’s lawyer pushed back, saying it was a “real risk” that AI could kill everybody, hence his client’s totally altruistic desire to legally cripple his own xAI’s biggest competitor via this lawsuit, Rogers sounds like she got straight-up irritated at the ways this corporate fraud lawsuit keeps insisting on getting dumb: “It’s ironic your client, despite these risks, is creating a company that is in the exact space,” Rogers said. “There are some people who do not want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk’s hands … But we’re not going to get into that business.”

Elsewhere in the trial, Musk also attempted to employ what sounds like classic internet trolling techniques to get out of questions he didn’t want to answer, answering several questions from OpenAI’s lawyers by repeatedly stating. “You just can’t steal a charity.” Which, turns out, doesn’t work if you have a judge there to yell at you for doing it, as Rogers eventually told Musk to stop playing parrot and just answer the damn questions.

Musk’s time on the stand in the trial has now ended, although it’s still possible he could be called back for further, presumably just as cringe-y, testimony.