A pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is raising the alarm about the hazards presented by the technology on which his work was built.
Geoffrey Hinton, the British computer scientist known as the "Godfather of AI," recently resigned from his job as a vice president and engineering fellow at Google in order to join the hundreds of other specialists in the industry who are speaking out about the challenges and risks of AI.
"It's difficult to see how you can prevent bad actors from using it for bad things," Hinton, 75, said in an interview with The New York Times.
Following the March release of the latest version of OpenAI's GPT chatbot, other AI professionals signed an open letter written by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute warning that the technology poses "profound risks to society and humanity."
Hinton, like the letter's authors, described recent advances in AI as "scary" and expressed concern about what they may imply for the future, especially now that Microsoft has integrated the technology into its Bing search engine.
With Google now hurrying to do the same, Hinton warned that the competition between Big Tech companies to build more powerful AI might quickly become out of hand.
One aspect of AI technology that worries computer scientists is its capacity to generate misleading visuals, photographs, and text to the point that the typical person will "not be able to know what is true anymore."
He also cautioned that in the future, AI may be utilized to produce completely autonomous weaponry and replace people in the job.
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people—a few people believed that,” Hinton said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
Hinton is most recognized for his contributions to the invention of deep learning, a type of machine learning that trains computers to analyze data in the same way that the human brain does.
That work was critical to the development of AI, but Hinton later expressed regret for his role in the process.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” he said.
Hinton informed Google last month that he was departing after more than a decade with the business.
On May 1, he stressed that his resignation was simply for the purpose of isolating the company from his views and had nothing to do with Google's approach to AI.
“I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google,” he wrote in a tweet. “Google has acted very responsibly.”
In a statement provided to The New York Times, Jeff Dean, Google senior vice president of research and AI, said: “We remain committed to a responsible approach to AI. We’re continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.”
