(ReclaimingAmerica.net) – A pioneering veteran developer of artificial intelligence (AI) has resigned from his Google job to raise the alarm about the risks connected with the technology behind chatbots, such as ChatGPT and Google Bard.
75-year-old Geoffrey Hinton, nicknamed the “godfather” of AI, told The New York Times that he had regrets about helping develop generative artificial intelligence, Breitbart News reported.
His life’s work has formed the foundation for the AI systems that major Big Tech companies use now.
“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Dr. Hinton declared.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he added.
The computer scientist stressed that generative AI could boost “the spread of misinformation, displace jobs, and even threaten humanity in the long term.”
Hinton’s early research on neural networks goes back to the 1970s. In 2012, that led to a ground-breaking development.
Together with his graduate students at the University of Toronto, he created systems that could identify and decipher objects in dozens of thousands of photos.
This opened the way for further advancement in AI, such as chatbots of the ChatGPT and Google Bard type.
However, Hinton now believes that the growing might of AI systems is associated with the growing risks they pose to humans.
“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forward. That’s scary,” the AI godfather stated.
In his words, the growing rivalry between Microsoft and Google would make it impossible to prevent the creation of artificial intelligence technology that would be potentially harmful.
Hinton’s primary concern is that the AI chatbot will overwhelm the Internet with fake information. Thus, it might become near-impossible for the average person to differentiate between facts and lies.
“My fear is that the internet will be inundated with false photos, videos, and text, and the average person will not be able to know what is true anymore,” he stated.
His worries don’t end there, though. The AI pioneer has concerns that the technology he helped develop would hit the job market. That would especially be the case with jobs involving repetitive work, for instance, the positions of translators, personal assistants, and paralegals.
“It takes away the drudge work. It might take away more than that,” Hinton said.
At the same time, he dreads the possibility that AI would surpass human intelligence and lead to the creation of autonomous weapons.
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that. 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,” the AI godfather concluded.
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Renowned AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has quit his job at Google to voice his concerns about the risks associated with generative AI, the technology behind popular chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard. https://t.co/qtLp3py6M3
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) May 1, 2023
