As a prominent researcher in AI safety (I discovered prompt injection) I should explain that Helen Toner is a big name in the AI safety community - she’s one of the top 20 most respected people in our community, like Rohin Shah.
The “who on earth” question is a good question about Tasha. But grouping Helen in with Tasha is just sexist. By analogy, Tasha is like Kimbal Musk, whereas Helen is like Tom Mueller.
Tasha seems unqualified but Helen is extremely qualified. Grouping them together is sexist and wrong.
That’s more the domain of “AI ethics” which I guess is cool but I personally think is much much much less important than AI safety.
AI safety is concerned with preventing human extinction due to (for example) AI causing accidental war or accidental escalation.
For example, making sure that AI won’t turn a heated conventional war into a nuclear war by being used for military intelligence analysis (writing summaries of the current status of a war) and then incorrectly saying that the other side is preparing for a nuclear first strike -- due to the AI being prone to hallucination, or to prompt injection or adversarial examples which can be injected by 3rd-party terrorists.
For more information on this topic, you can reference the recent paper ‘Catalytic nuclear war’ in the age of artificial intelligence & autonomy: Emerging military technology and escalation risk between nuclear-armed states:
It has about as much real world applicability as those people who charge money for their classes on how to trade crypto. Or maybe "how to make your own cryptocurrency".
Not only does current AI not have that ability, it's not clear that AI with relevant capabilities will ever be created.
IMO it's born out of a generation having grown up on "Ghost in the Shell" imagining that if an intelligence exists and is running on silicon, it can magically hack and exist inside every connected device on earth. But "we can't prove that won't happen".
The methods behind the different scenarios - disinformation, false-flagging, impersonation, stoking fear, exploiting the tools used to make the decisions - aren't new. States have all the capability to do them right now, without AI. But if a state did so, they would face annihilation if anyone found out what they were doing. And the manpower needed to run a large-scale disinformation campaign means a leak is pretty likely. So it's not worth it.
But, with AI, a small terrorist group could do it. And it'd be hard to know which ones were planning to, because they'd only need to buy the same hardware as any other small tech company.
(I hope I've summarized the article well enough.)