An Artificial Intelligence (AI) pioneer known as the “Godfather of AI” has resigned from Google in order to speak more publicly about the technology’s possible hazards.
Dr. Geoffrey Hinton spent nearly a decade at Google working on machine learning algorithms before departing. His lifetime work on neural networks is said to have given him the moniker.
However, Hinton clarified in a tweet on May 1 that he left Google “so that I could talk about the dangers of AI.” In an interview with the New York Times, he expressed worry about AI’s usage in flooding the internet with phony photographs, videos, and text, saying that many people won’t “be able to know what is true anymore.”
Hinton was also worried about AI taking over employment. He thinks AI will represent a danger to mankind in the future because it will learn unexpected behaviors from the huge volumes of data it monitors. He also raised worry about the ongoing AI arms race, which attempts to advance the technology for application in lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS).
Hinton also acknowledged some remorse for his life’s work, saying, “I console myself with the usual excuse: If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have.” In recent months, regulators, policymakers, and executives from the tech sector have all voiced alarm about the advancement of AI. Over 2,600 tech executives and researchers signed an open letter in March urging a temporary halt to AI development due to “profound risks to society and humanity.”
In April, a group of 12 European Union legislators signed a similar petition, and a recent EU draft regulation categorizes AI products depending on their danger levels. The United Kingdom is also contributing $125 million to a task committee to create “safe AI.” AI technologies are purportedly already being used for misinformation, with recent incidents of media outlets being duped into publishing false news, with one German site even using AI to manufacture an interview.
On May 1, Binance said it had been the target of a disinformation campaign orchestrated by ChatGPT and published screenshots of the chatbot saying its CEO, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, was a member of a Chinese Communist Party youth group The bot linked to a Forbes article and a LinkedIn page where it claimed to have gotten the information. However, the article does not seem to exist, and the LinkedIn profile is not Zhao’s.
A crew of pranksters also fooled other media publications across the globe last week, including the Daily Mail and The Independent. The Daily Mail published, then removed a story about a putative Canadian actor named “Saint Von Colucci” who was reported to have died after undergoing cosmetic surgery to appear more like a South Korean pop star.
The information came from a press release on the actor’s death, which was sent by an entity posing as a public relations agency and included what seemed to be AI-generated graphics.
Die Aktuelle, a German news organization, released an interview in April that utilized ChatGPT to synthesize a chat with former Formula One driver Michael Schumacher, who suffered major brain damage in a skiing accident in 2013. It was rumored that Schumacher’s family will sue over the story.
