Why do you care about AI Existential Safety?

My personal and professional interests revolve mainly around two core challenges: how to preserve the environment and how to make the best possible use of human intellectual potential, by establishing better policies and introducing improved regulatory framework. Both were heavily impacted by the advent of AI. This drives my commitment to AI existential safety and my desire to collaborate on AI-related issues with academics, researchers and developers worldwide.

Please give at least one example of your research interests related to AI existential safety:

I will outline three interconnected examples from my recent and ongoing (2021-2025) research activities. The first addresses AI’s role in education on climate change; the second examines regulatory and ethical issues raised by AI-driven copyright infringements; and the third examines AI-related threats and opportunities in energy transition.

1. Education on climate change – Research project “AI and education on climate change mitigation – from King Midas problem to a golden opportunity?” (May – December 2024) – principal investigator and grantee of the Future of Life Institute. When I started working on this assignment, I was only partially aware of how and to what extent the use of AI can represent a threat (but also a significant opportunity) for global endeavors to mitigate climate change and, even more, to provide meaningful education (ECCM – education on climate change mitigation) on this issue. While the existing, general AI-assisted educational tools are adaptable to quick societal changes and rapidly changing environment, they can also easily be used for deceptive and manipulative purposes, conveying potentially devastating conspiracy theories. My primary conclusion was that innovative AI-supported educational tools, tailored to the needs of education on climate change mitigation, are urgently needed. These tools must embrace cross-disciplinary curricula, be able to combat prejudices, misconceptions, and conspiracy theories, and address long-term AI safety challenges.
2. Human creativity and intellectual property law – Research project “Regulatory and ethical evaluation of the outputs of AI-based text-to-image software solutions” (April 2022 – June 2025) – principal investigator; the project was conducted at the Institute of European Studies (Belgrade, Serbia) and the EU Intellectual Property Office (Alicante, Spain), and was supported by the Innovation Fund of the Republic of Serbia. The aptitude of AI-based tools to “create” various pieces of art has deeply worried not only content creators: particularly concerned are individual artists and smaller creative communities. How can we design an optimal regulatory framework that safeguards and remunerates genuine human creativity, while enabling the legitimate development and deployment of AI in creative industries?
3. Energy transition – Research project “Energy transition through cross-border inter-municipal cooperation” – Grantee of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (July 2022 – June 2023). In this project, I explored how to incentivize and regulate the responsible use of AI in energy transition.