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It means something like, "make sure that when it pretends it's a real boyfriend or when it's used to code your next iPhone app or when it's used to design new scientific experiments or etc., it behaves in a way that is consistent with something that shares our values." I'm not sure what the "conscious as a brick" has to do with this; whether or not AI is conscious or has free will or agency are very interesting questions, but they're mostly irrelevant to issues of AI alignment, which has to do with AI behavior.
If the latter is what the alignment chat sounds like, I think it must be a result of manipulation on the part of people who expose the chat to you. I've seen pretty much no talk in AI alignment that could reasonably be paraphrased as anything like that.
But it's not dumb and dangerous; it's (definitionally) generally intelligent and dangerous. And specifically dangerous because it's not dumb and is generally intelligent. Now, whether AGI will lead to ASI and how likely that is is an empirical question, though I'm personally convinced by arguments that it's pretty darn likely. But whether the AI is generally intelligent or superintelligent, that has nothing to do with whether or not it's agentic or develops its own aims.
The point is that a tool (or, for that matter, anything, including biological organisms) need not have agency or have aims or goals of its own or anything that we would characterize as "free will" or "consciousness" or "sentience" to do things that detrimental to humanity, and the fact that the tool is generally intelligent in this case means that we currently lack a way to have meaningful level of confidence that the behavior of the tool will be within the bounds of what the tool-user considers reasonable bounds. When dealing with current generally intelligent things - i.e. other humans - we have so many things in common with them - certainly physically and biologically and most likely culturally as well - that we don't have to explicitly spell out every little thing, and we can make fairly reliable predictions about how things we spell out to them will get translated to action. We lack such things for AI as of yet, and so we lack an intuition or a particularly reliable way to figure out how AIs will fail or misunderstand our intent.
Well yes, ultimately the people who created the tools and/or wield the tools are responsible, not the tools themselves. Guns don't kill people (but they sure help), I do. The problem is that the people who create, manage, use, etc. the tools lack the capability to set it up in such a way that we can be confident that it won't wander off away and run KillAllHumans.exe without letting anyone know. The easy solution that presents itself is to just not use the tool if you can't set it up with that level of safety. One major problem is that AI is so darn useful that it's hard to get the political will to suppress the supply from providing to the demand. The other big problem is that we lack en enforcement mechanism to make sure that no one sets up this tool, and as such, entities that choose to set up and use the tool anyway could gain power over us and make our lives hellish before all our lives are snuffed out by the un-aligned ASI.
This is the dilemma that's being discussed and debated about right now in the AI alignment chatting.
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