Criticism for artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots is beginning to accumulate from tech leaders and industry officials—who equally acknowledge and fear its innovative power.
Key Details
- The launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November, Google Bard this month, and the Chinese Ernie-Bot in March has marked the beginning of “the AI arms race.”
- Dozens of tech companies are rushing to produce commercially viable AIs that can further innovate the tech industry through predictive text and auto-generated business writing.
- The capabilities of these AIs are well documented. Still, fears of dangers are equally spreading, as figures like Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and entrepreneur Mark Cuban join critics and lay out their concerns for the technology, Fortune reports.
Why It’s Important
The dangers of AI have long been known and warned about. OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk has warned for years that there will be a day when artificial intelligence will proliferate to a point where it could create chaos and that humans might lose control of its potential, even becoming a threat to humanity.
Concerns have only grown in the past three months, as users discovered ChatGPT was powerful enough to perform the majority of business writing tasks to a satisfactory level, even writing speeches and completing university-level papers. This could put alot of low-level secretary and writing jobs at risk, which only grows more prominent as more complex tasks like accounting and coding can be assigned to AI in the future. As automation grows, the risk of widespread white-collar layoffs grows with it.
That is in addition to the disruptive dangers of deep fake technology and its ability to crash markets, halt political processes, cheat university exams, and steal identities with fake statements and messages.
As we previously reported, AI is still in its infancy and cannot perform complex or subtle tasks with elegance to the point where it is indistinguishable from a human. Microsoft President Brad Smith has outlined safety and ethical concerns regarding how AI developers ought to approach the technology going forward to address potential adverse outcomes. However, companies continue to rush out the technology to the public as fast as possible.
Notable Quotes
Prabhakar Raghavan has noted the danger that AI can yield incorrect results. “This type of artificial intelligence we’re talking about can sometimes lead to something we call hallucination … [a] convincing but completely fictitious answer.”
Steve Wozniak finds AI useful but potentially dangerous, saying he is skeptical of attempting to create technology that mimics humans. “The trouble is it does good things for us, but it can make horrible mistakes by not knowing what humanness is,” he says.
Mark Cuban noted in a recent interview that AI-generated misinformation could only grow worse as the technology grows and proliferates, even as it has the potential to be groundbreaking. “Once these things start taking on a life of their own…the machine itself will have an influence, and it will be difficult for us to define why and how the machine makes the decisions it makes, and who controls the machine,” he says.