Should we be more concerned about the future of humanity with A.I.?

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has been the hot topic since the year started with the popularization of OpenAI's ChatGPT-3. Chat-GPT3 is an artificial intelligence chatbot that provide responses to questions and prompts using its own intellect. It uses include summarizing text, writing essays, coding in different languages, translating languages, creating presentations, copywriting, writing comments across social media, extracting quotes, creating videos and more.

Upon Microsoft's increased investment in OpenAI, many competitors like Google and Meta has also rolled out their own version of A.I. and chatbots. There are over 100 A.I. tools currently being used in the market with the ability to convert for text to images, videos, code, speech, music etc.

The most recent phenomenon that has many questioning how far A.I. will go is the creation of doctored images and scenarios that appear as "real-life" situations, and the replication of musicians' voices. Across the internet, there are many examples of this, such as a doctored picture of Donald Trump resisting arrest in New York City as a depiction of a possible situation to come with his upcoming trial. Other examples include a doctored picture of Pope Francis in a puffy white jacket and cross chain, children with nuclear warheads in a classroom, celebrities at award shows, and content creators using Kanye's voice to for a song. These are just a few examples of how A.I. is currently being used and can be leveraged to disperse misinformation and distorted reality in many cases.

Yesterday, Elon Musk, with Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak, and over 1000 tech leaders in the industry signed an open letter calling for at least a 6-month ban on creating and testing A.I. tools and systems. Other majors tech leaders who signed the letter included Evan Sharp, co-founder of Pinterest, Chris Larson, the co-founder of crypto company Ripple, and Turin-award winning computer scientist Yoshua Benign. The letter implores that A.I. tech companies should hold off on training and developing any A.I. tool more powerful than GPT-4, the latest mega A.I. tool. The letter pens that the development and deployment of A.I. tools have gone out-of-control in recent months and that there is a level of planning, oversight and management needed that is not happening. The letter further expressed that A.I. is becoming "more human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?" The overall advice of the signatories is to make today's A.I. safer, more transparent, trustworthy, program to work with humans not replace them, be of government inclusion and supervision and be reliable.

Some users of A.I. tools have argued that these leaders are all in agreement because A.I. has created opportunities for many to build, deploy and use powerful systems for free, without the need to gatekeep and monetize as they do with other platforms. Others expressed that their only point of agreement with this letter relates is the concerns expressed about ethics and safety.

As mentioned earlier, these A.I. tools are developing faster than ever and branching into capabilities further than anyone has imagined. They allow for the availability of information so quickly due to their powerful connection to the internet. This begs the questions...

• Will A.I. eventually gain access to and provide private/sensitive information to anyone just from a prompt?

• Will A.I. be so developed and advanced that it can create more believable misinformation of speech, videos, and scenarios that could instigate political and social conflicts?

• With the existence of individuals whose aim is to cause harm and chaos, will they leverage and even develop advanced A.I. solely for the purpose of harming others?

We are living in a very advanced and technology driven era. As a society, we have embraced the stages of technological development that has shaped our learning, education, mobility, societal advancement and productivity. A.I. is a new stage for us to embrace and adapt to, and it will not go away. However, how do we allow for it's inclusion without detriment to ourselves? Should there be governmental control of A.I.? Should limits be imposed on the creative freedom of technology developments in the future?

There are so many questions and pain points that should be explored as we embrace this new age of technology.

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Link to the Letter: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/