The AI news got my attention when Dr. Geoffrey Hinton resigned from Google. The “Godfather of AI” wanted to speak publicly about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.
“It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he said. Really? I thought that AI’s downside was creating essays for less-than-motivated students and driving teachers crazy.
What was I missing? Apparently a lot. I’m now getting emails informing me how AI is going to influence medical care. And how it’s affecting veterinarians. Then there are the offers of how I can “create” a song in the style of famous musicians in just seconds. I decided to try out the Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT to see how an AI chatbot worked. I asked it to write an article about myself. The results was fairly thorough, but not entirely accurate, given the large number of individuals with the same name as mine.
It was obvious that I needed to learn more about AI. I searched for information online. That was eye-opening. Amazingly, AI learning is everywhere … including university degrees, graduate certificates, and online courses. The AI environment is only at its early stages of development. There will soon be a vast number of AI experts designing new applications for for the technology that we can’t even imagine yet.
Worries about artificial intelligence systems outsmarting humans intensified with the rise of a new generation of highly capable AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. No wonder 1,000 current AI researchers recently called for a six-month pause on the training of new, powerful AI systems. Their concern for the risks to society and humanity are legitimate.