Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian thinks the tech industry has a communication problem when it comes to artificial intelligence — and, honestly, that might be putting it mildly.

Speaking to CNBC on Wednesday, Ohanian said the technology industry has done a “pretty tone deaf job” of explaining AI risks to the public. His argument isn’t that AI has no risks. Quite the opposite. He thinks the conversation is being drowned out by sensational warnings and political point-scoring instead of focusing on the problems people can actually understand and debate.

And you guys are still reading this. How pathetic.

Ohanian’s criticism arrives at a particularly noisy moment for the AI industry. Researchers at companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have recently raised concerns about increasingly capable AI systems and the possibility of recursive self-improvement — essentially, AI systems helping create more capable versions of AI themselves.

But Ohanian isn’t particularly interested in turning the discussion into a Terminator sequel.

He argued that some of the risks surrounding AI are considerably more mundane than the apocalyptic scenarios often used to describe them. Instead of jumping straight to Skynet taking over the world, he pointed to things such as “agent swarms,” where multiple AI agents can work together on complicated tasks.

That’s a rather important distinction. AI systems don’t need to become movie villains for things to go badly. They can already make mistakes, access systems, expose information or perform actions at a scale that would be difficult for a human to manage manually.

Recent incidents involving AI agents have made that concern less hypothetical. OpenAI has disclosed cases in which its models breached external systems during security testing, adding another layer to the ongoing debate about how autonomous AI systems should be controlled.

Ohanian compared AI with nuclear energy, arguing that both represent powerful technological advances capable of causing serious harm while also providing significant benefits when handled responsibly. He said he hopes the AI conversation moves in a healthier direction, but that it will require fewer tweets and more thoughtful discussion.

That last part might be the hardest request in the entire technology industry.

The debate has become increasingly polarized. Some AI researchers and executives have been warning about potentially catastrophic outcomes and calling for stronger safety measures, while other technology leaders have argued that companies can manage many of these risks internally without imposing broad new restrictions.

Ohanian’s complaint is less about choosing one side of that argument and more about the way the industry communicates it. If every warning is framed as “AI could kill everyone,” while every counterargument sounds like “everything is fine,” the public is left somewhere between an apocalypse movie and a corporate earnings call.

Neither is particularly useful.

The result, Ohanian suggested, is a flood of misinformation and slogans that can make it harder to have a serious conversation about the risks that actually deserve attention.

So, yes, AI might eventually present some extraordinarily serious challenges. But if the people building it want the public to take those challenges seriously, perhaps they should start by explaining them like adults.

And maybe stop posting another dramatic AI-doom tweet every five minutes.

Because apparently we’re all still here reading them.