Why does Elon Musk fear AI? (August 7)

Elon Musk cautioned that civilization faces dangers from unrestrained artificial intelligence.  According to CNBC, during the World Government Conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Elon Musk, co-founder of OpenAI, the company that developed the ChatGPT tool, claimed that AI is among the biggest hazards to the survival of civilization. 

Does Elon Musk fear AI? But why?

The popular AI chatbot ChatGPT has prompted debate on the direction AI is taking and how it will affect people.

OpenAI developed an AI that is capable of writing prose that is so intricate that readers would think a person wrote it. The decision was made that this machine mind was simply too risky to be released, thus it is currently securely imprisoned on OpenAI’s networks. Even though Elon Musk is still listed as one of OpenAI’s sponsors and was a founding member, he actually resigned from his co-chair post in February of last year.

Elon Musk took to Twitter to clarify his reasons for departing from the company, stating his disagreement with its goals and intentions. Being a prominent advocate of doomsday scenarios, Musk firmly believes in the looming existential danger humanity faces due to the advancement of artificial intelligence.

The GPT-2 program from OpenAI is a technological advance that can produce language that is uncannily convincing and is created to write like a person. It was “trained” by studying eight million web pages, and as a result, it is now capable of writing lengthy passages in response to a human-provided “prompt.”

The machine mind won’t, however, be made publicly available in its complete form due to the possibility that it could be employed for malicious purposes, such as fabricating news, posing as someone else online, automating spam production, or creating abusive or false content to share on social media.

For obvious reasons, this is worrisome to journalists as well as numerous other professionals, like writers, because they can perform their duties rather successfully. In addition to language translation, it might be used to construct customer care “bots” for online purchasing, which would eliminate more jobs for people.

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