Paramount isn’t ready to give up on AI just yet. As the aggrieved parents of teens who killed themselves after speaking to AI chatbots testified to Congress about the tragic AI-induced mental health crises sweeping the world, Paramount has added a new AI executive to its board. Scale AI CFO Dennis Cinelli has joined Paramount as an independent director. Hailing from Uber, General Electric, and Scale AI, Cinelli joins a board of directors that includes Paramount president Jeff Shell, COO Andy Gordon, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, RedBird Capital Partners founder Gerry Cardinale, RedBird chairman John L. Thornton, Silver Lake managing director Justin Hamill, Lawrence Investments LLC president Paul Marinelli, and longtime board member Barbara Byrne (per The Wrap). It’s unclear what Cinelli’s presence means for Paramount. The studio says they hired him for his “expertise in disruptive technologies” and “extensive experience in strategic transactions and active engagement within the AI ecosystem.”
Cinelli joins at a difficult time in the AI hype cycle. Although AI was initially promoted as the next great technology to make our lives easier and more rewarding, it has come under increased scrutiny over safety and intellectual property ownership, while also cutting jobs and possibly running the U.S. government. Earlier today, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Universal filed a lawsuit against the generative AI app Hailuo, owned by the Chinese company MiniMax, for copyright infringement. The studios accuse MiniMax’s image and video generator of pirating and plundering the “Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works on a massive scale.”
Additionally, there have been increased concerns, at least among consumers, regarding AI safety and the psychological effects of sycophantic robots that encourage suicide and induce psychosis. Earlier today, the parents of teens who killed themselves after speaking with chatbots testified to Congress about the technology. The testimony prompted a statement from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who promised to protect teens through an “age-prediction system to estimate age based on how people use ChatGPT.” Furthermore, he pledged that ChatGPT would stop flirting with teens and would shut down any conversation related to suicide, stating, “We will attempt to contact the users’ parents and if unable, will contact the authorities in case of imminent harm.”
Experts don’t expect much from Altman, though. Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a children’s online safety advocacy group, told CBS: “This is a fairly common tactic — it’s one that Meta uses all the time — which is to make a big, splashy announcement right on the eve of a hearing which promises to be damaging to the company.”
