AI isn't really general AI yet, and the current path doesn't look like its capable of becoming a true general AI - The idea of an AI you can just ask to do something and its intelligent enough to figure out what it needs to do to achieve the goal, and repeat that for any subgoals. Our current models are more or less stretching the capabilities of sentence prediction to their limits to emulate intelligence. Efforts to add tool use to them has been mixed, but will probably make them more capable, but not a true general AI. Overall, not to worried about it - the nature of the current system means hallucinations are unavoidable, and only get worse (as in more devious and difficult to detect) as the systems get more advanced. So a sane human hand needs to be at the wheel at all times still. But that human hand will be able to achieve much much more with the same amount of effort using these AI systems, which is extremely important with our coming population decline putting incredible strain on our ability to keep up our various technological industries.
As for Aliens, there's two major dividing lines - If the Aliens are traveling here under conventional laws of physics, then nothing really changes - At the extreme benevolent end, we maybe get a kickstart on some fusion technology, particularly fusion torches for space travel. At the extremely malicious end, if they wanted us dead at all costs we would be dead already of an asteroid strike or ten, and anything less than that, nuclear weapons are probably our saving grace - nothing in conventional physics makes you immune to a nuclear weapon to the face.
If they're traveling via unconventional or undiscovered laws of physics, then all bets are off, and the only real assumption we can make is that its not malicious - If you have some FTL equivalent or other such bullshit, resources as we know them become functionally infinite regardless of population scale. And we can assume earth doesn't have some magical supply of some essential element for unconventional physics abuse, otherwise we'd have found it by now. All we can reasonably assume is that we're not particularly interesting or worth bothering with, and that we're seeing the equivalent of a lazy conservationist department watching us and being really bad at hiding it.
That being said, my official position is very much that all the current Alien shit is bullshit news cycle manipulation, the 'announcements' have all come hand in hand with bad news for various political or economic matters that just so happen to be glossed over to focus the days news on ayylmaos. The only legitimate thing coming out at all from it is the various militaries being mildly concerned about unexplained shit they're seeing - and its only legit because its their job to assume and prepare for the worst when they get reports of seeing weird things. If your observations think they found a new weapon, its better to assume they're right and you gotta do something than to dismiss them and get blindsided. And they're not immune to seeing patterns in random data either.
