Doubtful, more like a bunch of shitty AI are in charge of various things. Read the book Weapons of Math Destruction if you want to learn about real world examples of AI harming humans. Much more mundane than what you're imagining, but still damages and controls humans

Any good resources for trying to build a counter-propagation model?

I understand that it is basically input layer->SOM->Grossberg/outstar layer

The part giving me trouble is the Grossberg/outstar layer. It feels like I can find next to no information about it (and counter-propagation in general) searching online. For now, I have a dense layer where the outstar layer would go, and I'm getting roughly the same results as the NN made of 7 dense layers I'm comparing my model against. That certainly doesn't feel right, and I'm pretty desperate for some clarification on the subject lol

Additionally, is there a reason why there's no discourse on counter-propagation models? Multiple variations of the phrase got zero results on this subreddit. I understand it was pretty popular before the use of multiple hidden layers, any reason why it seems to be unnoticed in modern times?